by Kevin Chong
She let that last statement sit as she dipped her sashimi. People always wanted to confide in Tso, who considered a response. She decided to check the time on her phone. Finally, when that piece of sashimi was completely tanned in soy, she nodded and said, “My fiancé and I split up early in the year.”
Grossman’s face took on an energy that wasn’t there before. “It’s the worst, isn’t it?”
This woman probably meant something else by worst, Tso thought. It hadn’t been that bad, especially on the road. She could block Markus’s e-mails and he hadn’t yet learned her new cellphone number. He hated air travel, so the distance had made her feel safe. “I’m still processing it,” she said.
“It is a process.” She repeated, “Pro-cess,” Canadian-style. “Janet moved out six months ago.” Hi, we’re Janet and Janice, Tso thought to herself. “I called her so much in the first month that she changed all her information. Eventually, she wrote me a letter. And then two more letters. I haven’t opened them. Since she wanted more space, I figure I needed more time.” Grossman asked for the bill. “We should go. I’ll tell you more about it at the party.”
The converted porn theatre was entirely respectable, even with the vintage nudes in the bathroom and the old marquee above the bar. This would be the “fun” event, the one that brought her to the city early; another, more mysterious obligation paid much more and justified her extended trip. Tonight’s event was conducted like a lecture series with talks to be given by an embalmer and a spiritualist, as well as two others besides Tso. Grossman was, as promised, a jittery host, whose remarks tended to crumple in mid-sentence. Tso was saved for last. She felt like a jukebox, able to recite her speech, even the ad-libbed moments, as though it were etched into her throat.
As she gave her remarks, pausing for chuckles, a parallel talk took shape in her mind. This was the book I wrote after I volunteered for six months, writing down life stories at a hospice, she thought, but I got a nice book advance—one I had to burn through to pay for the lawyers to throw a legal firewall between me and Markus—and the marketing manager told me to tell funny stories about the mummies of the Atacama Desert to make you feel comfortable about turning cemeteries into picnic spaces and taxidermying your pets. This is one of the reasons Markus used to say I was crazy.
She got through the talk and signed forty-six copies of her book. This was pleasant. People spoke to her as though they’d read her book; they edged toward her like they were at a high-school dance. Their opening remarks felt rehearsed in their heads but not in their mouths. They posed for photos with her.
Tso watched Grossman strike down the stage and move folding chairs into the back room by herself. She meant to help, but one of the readers had bought her a glass of wine. The group of attendees, a dozen of them, had already been invited to Grossman’s reception, and they all piled into cabs. Tso was pulled along. They arrived at a big house with an abandoned grocery store on the main floor and a side door with three separate mailboxes next to it, each one a different shape and colour. Grossman hadn’t come back with them, but they pressed her buzzer. When there was no response on the intercom, another person in the group knocked on the door. An older man answered promptly. He had the same frizzy hair as Grossman, but he was bald on top and the hair cascaded from the sides of his head. This—and the buttoned-up pyjamas he wore—gave him the appearance of a mad inventor.
Someone that Tso recognized from the event emerged from a door upstairs. “Come on up!” she told them. Tso watched the group dash up past Mr Grossman until she was the only one left. The door was still open to his ground-floor suite.
“Where’s Janice?” he asked, tightening the collar of his bathrobe. His blue eyes were small, hooded, downturned.
“She’s on her way, Mr Grossman.” She held out her hand. “I’m Megan.”
His nostrils flared as he looked at her hand. He bunched his collar more tightly. “Janice told me about her party,” he said. “Tell her she needs to check on Far-head. He’s still behind on rent and November is coming around. I never wanted to rent to him. And you know what? That doesn’t make me racist. I’m a good judge of character.” Without another word, he turned back into his suite.
The lecture was unexpectedly pleasant, but she’d reached her half-life of fun. The party upstairs wouldn’t have exceeded the delight she’d have unpacking her tightly crammed suitcase and slipping on her pyjamas. If only I didn’t have the wrong bag. Back in the hotel, she wouldn’t even be able to run her toothbrush across her teeth.
Grossman appeared at the entrance carrying a bag of ice under each arm. “Oh good, I was worried you’d left,” she said to Tso. “I’ve set everything up.”
“Do you always show up late to your own parties?” Tso asked. She followed her up the creaky steps.
“Who else is going to get ice?” she replied.
“I met your dad,” Tso said as they reached the landing. The door had been locked, and Grossman rapped on it and waited patiently to be let back into her own apartment. “He mentioned someone named Far-head?”
“Farhad’s our tenant,” she said, looking across the landing to another door. “Dad doesn’t like him, mainly because he’s Persian. Plus he’s rude and is always late with rent, so Dad didn’t totally miss the mark. He didn’t even have references when he applied. I guess I shouldn’t have taken him on.”
Tso looked at Farhad’s door. On it a piece of loose-leaf paper was stapled that read: Let this be over by nine. It was already nine-thirty.
“Why did you rent to him in the first place?”
“No one else would,” she said. It sounded like she’d heard this question before.
A party guest let them into Grossman’s apartment, which was lit entirely by what seemed to be an assortment of scented candles. Tso offered her shoes to the pile that grew by the door. Grossman threw her jacket on an air mattress in her bedroom. The apartment was ample but half-empty. Tso saw a home full of missing objects: a space where an armchair might have been placed, a vacancy on the kitchen counter from a displaced coffee maker. The heavy and severe curtains belonged to a night person.
At the kitchen table, Tso loaded her plate from a mezze platter and filled her plastic glass from a box of red wine. The Best of Leonard Cohen was playing on iPod speakers. In the living room, the dozen or so death enthusiasts sat in a circle on the floor, their eyes closed.
Tso thought they were conducting a séance, but it was a game of Werewolf that had just started. She’d played this game before; it was called Mafia when she participated, but it was essentially the same. The game’s narrator asked the two werewolves to open their eyes. Next they pointed to the villager they wanted to “kill.” Then the village doctor opened her eyes and tried to guess the next victim and save them. She failed. When this was done, all the participants were asked to open their eyes. “Dawn has broken,” the narrator said. “And there has been another casualty in the village.” Everyone else had to guess who the werewolves were.
Accusations, misdirection, and disavowals ensued. People have fled their homelands to escape such conditions, Tso thought. Anything can be passed off as fun and every nightmare must be play-acted afterward. Tso only editorialized when she was in a bad mood.
“I would have sat out this game even if they’d asked me to play. There’s too much tension.” Tso hadn’t noticed Grossman standing next to her. She held a glass of punch that was filled to the top with the ice that she had brought to her own party. The way she held the glass, at chest level, seemed to suggest she was holding it for someone.
“Is it hard to get a cab from here?” Tso asked. “I’m feeling the jetlag.”
Grossman said she would call one for her. “But first I need to tell you the rest of my story.”
She grabbed Tso’s upper arm and led her to an alcove with a computer. It was a quieter place to relate her woes, as “Suzanne” wafted in the background.
Tso was not particularly forthright about her own feelings. Frien
ds described her default expression as haughty and disdainful, and yet people always confided in her. First, she asked questions (in order to avoid talking about herself). And she never passed judgement; to offer approval or criticism felt like overreach. For those who had guilty consciences, like a group of grave robbers she’d once interviewed in Arizona, she granted absolution. Their unhappiness was externalized into a paper ball, and she was the waste basket.
This was Grossman’s story: She had met Janet for the first time twenty-five years ago, when Janet was still in middle-school. “I was her camp counsellor,” she said. “I made sure she went to bed on time and was wearing enough sunscreen.” Grossman had recently come out and wore T-shirts that celebrated her newly acknowledged sexuality: one had a rainbow flag on it, another featured an illustration of Gertrude Stein. The morning after Parents Welcome Day, she was called in by the camp administrator, who suggested she make wiser sartorial choices. In a fury, Grossman quit.
When she met Janet in a bar nearly a decade later, she neither recognized nor remembered her—that came later. What drew Grossman to Janet was her strong nose, dark unruly eyebrows, and a resting downturned mouth—features that would age well. “She looked like the younger version of a portrait that might hang in a haunted house,” she said. “She seemed mature beyond her age, but she was being herself.” They had, Grossman admitted, a blisteringly sexual relationship in their first couple of months. “It was hot,” she said. “We were two people used to getting sex twice in one week and then living off the crumbs of those memories for another eight months until our next opportunity.” They bounced between hostels and beachside campsites in Mexico for two months. Then Janet fell ill with Lyme disease, and they grew closer during her recovery. Grossman loved caring for her. She even considered training as a nurse, but she didn’t want to go back to school.
Janet, however, still wanted to learn. She was a painter, and Grossman supported her through her MFA. She deferred her own creative dreams for her wage-work in tourism. Grossman’s father needed to be cared for, so they arranged to live with him. This saved them enough money that Janet no longer had to toil as a teaching assistant. By watching YouTube videos, Grossman learned how to fix leaky faucets and replace toilet bowl stoppers. After the corner store downstairs was closed, Janet used it briefly as a studio space, but the light was poor, and it was like trying to see to the bottom of a bowl of chicken broth.
At the beginning of the year, Janet’s career had broken through to find an audience. After nearly two decades of painting, she won a major award, was profiled in an influential glossy magazine, and found a New York dealer. It all came at once. “In some ways, she no longer needed me to care for her. If we were eating out, I didn’t have to pick up the tab,” Grossman told Tso. “But then there would be a deadline for a big show, and the dealer was a shark who would drop her if she flopped. Her anxiety levels peaked. So she needed me more. However, now she resented it. One time, the day before one of her openings, we had a big fight because I wanted to wear the same suit I’d worn for her last show. When the exhibition turned out be a hit, she apologized. She moved out a few days later.”
Unlike most of her contemporaries who explored mixed media and abstraction, Janet was a figurative painter. Her watercolours were inspired by both comic books and Mexican folk art, and her subjects were entirely young women—friends and family members in outdoor landscapes inspired by trips along the province’s north coast. Grossman appeared in a number of Janet’s paintings, but only as a stylized version of herself. She was painted in the Gertrude Stein T-shirt, but not in the way she looked when she was a camp counsellor. “My hair is asymmetrical in those portraits, but I didn’t have that hairdo until years later,” Grossman said. “Plus, I’m the only one who is fully clothed. Everyone else is topless or pant-less. It’s like she doesn’t want to imagine me naked. Either that, or she doesn’t want to show the world the woman who she saw naked.”
Tso shook her head. “I don’t think that’s what she meant,” she told Grossman. It’s exactly what she means. She realized again she was in a terrible mood.
Now that Janet was gone, Grossman said that she volunteered for many community arts events. “I’m taking a comedy course, too,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to try stand-up.”
Tso noted silently that Grossman had not attempted a single joke that night while introducing any of the presenters and that she seemed almost divorced from any sense of humour. Months later—when she had a standing order at a restaurant in Vancouver, when the city had been quarantined and she had seen people seriously ill—Tso remembered the restlessness of her first night with yearning. (She yearned for her agency.) By that time, she considered Grossman hilarious and endearingly damaged.
Someone at the party found Grossman and asked her to change the music to something more upbeat. Tso chose this moment to leave the party without a farewell. She crept to the front hall where she attempted to find her shoes from the bottom of the large pile. She took a picture of the shoes and would post it when she got home. She thought of a pithy caption: “This party is ghost-busted.” Once she was outside on the landing, she glanced across to the door of Grossman’s neighbour, Farhad Khan. The door was slightly ajar and the note had been changed.
I have killed myself, it read. Call the police. You do not need to see this.
The floorboards creaked as Tso inched toward the door. She could hear someone groaning. That meant he—Farhad—was alive. She heard a crash, the sound of feet, a body, and then the smack of a head hitting the floor. She jumped back. She would return to Grossman’s apartment and make her go in and see what had happened. Her heart outraced the lazy beat of the eighties party music that had followed Leonard Cohen. Tso spotted Grossman at the far end of the living room, her glass full of ice.
Tso needed to get to her, but the people in the room—and the jovial, tipsy mood within it—made that distance feel impassable. She edged around the wall toward Grossman as the game of Werewolf finally concluded. The remaining participants opened their eyes. The final innocent villager had been killed, and one party-goer, the remaining werewolf, still looked circumspect. “I warned everyone,” one of previously eliminated players complained. “But now we’re all dead.”
5.
Rieux and his mother had returned to his condo when he saw his first victim of the disease.
At the airport, Rieux’s mother waited for him at the arrivals area, her Burberry jacket, handed down from her daughter, folded over her arm. He apologized for being late, but she had just come through the exit after waiting for a half hour for her bag to arrive on the conveyor belt. She only had her carry-on. “I got dizzy looking for it,” she said. “Please, Son, will you help me speak to the airline?”
The man behind the desk at the counter said that all the luggage had been unloaded and claimed. “It’s possible that the bag has been stolen,” he told them. “It happens rarely. Do you have insurance?”
Mrs Rieux looked at her son in dismay and tugged the sleeve of his fleece jacket. It saddened him that his mother, once a woman who instilled fear among landlords, bureaucrats, and plumbers—as fearless as she was obsequious to her employers and the relatives who gave her money for her children’s school expenses and tuition—now seemed so small and looked to him to make things better. Dr Rieux puffed out his chest and told him that airport security needed improvement. He gave the man his address and contact information should the luggage turn up.
“You’ve aged,” she told him when they were in the cab. “That’s good. Your patients will take you more seriously. That’s not a bad thing. You look more like your father every day.”
Rieux’s father was only a half decade older than he was now—thirty-six—when he had been killed in a car crash. Rieux was five when his father died, old enough to have memories of him, though few remained—the sense of his father’s moustache across his cheek was one of them. His father had been a doctor too, although Rieux had made no effort to emulate
him. He’d passed on to his only son his hair, his slight stature, and according to Mrs Rieux, his taste for argument.
Mrs Rieux herself was a devout Catholic who believed in reincarnation. She saw joy in patterns and was the kind of person who, while eating a meal, was reminded of some place she’d visited as a child and would tell you all about it. She sometimes believed that the strangers she spoke to were dead relatives reborn. As she grew older, she became even more fanciful.
“Elyse sends her regards,” Rieux offered.
“It makes me so sad for you two.” She dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “When I look at her Facebook profile and see her most recent shots, it’s like a light being dimmed.”
“She’s optimistic about this … treatment,” he said. “What’s important is that she remains positive.”
“Have you eaten?” she asked.
He’d conscientiously avoided dinner. Mrs Rieux would cook and clean while she was here. In Hong Kong, she was waited on by a Filipina helper hired by his older sister. When they arrived at his house, Mrs Rieux swept immediately into the kitchen before she even washed her face and wrapped an apron around her waist. Rieux set her jacket and handbag on the bed in the spare room where he would have taken her suitcase. It was the better room, with a mountain view, the one they had set aside for a nursery.
The phone rang. It was the seldom-used land line, a number called only by telemarketers and the woman who was now in the kitchen. “I am fine, Dr Rieux,” a voice announced.
“Mr Santos?” Rieux asked.
“Do not worry about me,” Mr Santos said. His breathing was heavy. “My wife worries too much.”
