The Plague

by Kevin Chong

  “What happened was that we needed to balance health safety with our concerns about our city’s most marginalized people. We failed in this regard. We have heard stories about harassment from our most desperate people. We have further demonized our most vulnerable people. Meanwhile, rates of infection haven’t decreased. The roadblocks have caused traffic congestion.” New measures would be announced soon to take the place of the old ones. “These new guidelines will be fairly applied to all. Until then, we all must proceed carefully. We don’t know the true extent of this health situation.”

  The question period followed. Most queries were couched in praise for the mayor’s demeanor. There was still an aura about him, and the press still wanted him to succeed. Their own work as political reporters had been lifted by Parsons’ lofty profile. Voter turnout had risen by a quarter because of his presence. People talked about residential zoning and garbage collection with the same depth of feeling as they would about the all-time greatest hockey players. Relatives and friends of reporters inquired about their work with interest.

  To his credit, only Horne-Bough asked a question that unnerved the mayor. “According to some accounts, twenty-nine people have died. When will we know this is a crisis?”

  “I—I don’t think it’s, uh, twenty-nine,” Parsons stammered. “That’s not confirmed.” The rest of the mayor’s mumbled response could not be stitched into a coherent reply.

  As the mayor finished the conference, he approached Horne-Bough and Siddhu, who had stood by the exit. “I hope you don’t mind some tough questions,” Horne-Bough said.

  The mayor smirked. “I’m still standing.”

  “Care to be in a Polaroid with a colleague?” he asked. “It’s for my private collection.”

  “Anything involving Ray-Ray here is okay,” the Mayor insisted. He put one arm around Siddhu. The mayor smelled like he had been outside all day. It wasn’t a bad odour. He gave off the smell of someone who’d spent the afternoon hiking through a rainforest path. Parsons held the same camera-ready smile even as Horne-Bough tried his shot from various angles, finally holding the Polaroid over his head.

  Later, at a nearby gastropub, Horne-Bough confessed that he was trying to see how long the mayor could hold his expression; the Polaroid shots caught only the tops of their heads. Each of them had the brewery’s tasting flights arranged in front of them on wooden trays. Horne-Bough seemed taken aback by the set-up—it looked like a science project. “I am more of a soju drinker,” he confessed. “I don’t even need fancy soju.”

  Horne-Bough looked to be in his mid-twenties. He came from a wealthy Toronto family and had arrived in Vancouver only two years earlier. Although he was privileged, he claimed that his money was largely his own. Four years earlier, he’d placed most of a small inheritance into the hands of some boarding-school friends who’d launched an app that was later sold for what was rumoured to be a nine-figure sum. He had little experience in news besides a CBC internship he’d completed after high school.

  With the exception of that internship, Horne-Bough’s work experience consisted of a string of odd, low-skill jobs: he played the “white guy” in a number of Korean TV shows after working on a documentary in Seoul. He cared for a falcon in Antwerp owned by an eccentric Belgian industrialist who dabbled in illegal arms dealing. He herded yaks in Tibet for two brothers married to the same woman—a local practice meant to keep land within a family. He so enjoyed recounting these workplace tales that Siddhu wondered whether that wasn’t the point in acquiring them. After all, he didn’t need the money. As he listed his jobs, he bounced between the mannerisms of a fey layabout and the more aggressive language of a bootstrapping start-up head.

  “I don’t do well if I don’t have something to do,” he said. “Or something in my hands.”

  “You should work with wood,” Siddhu suggested.

  Horne-Bough’s eyes flashed then dimmed. “Except that I’m so absent-minded, I’d lose a finger.”

  “Better yet,” Siddhu said, palming the yo-yo, “you should get one of these.”

  He let the yo-yo slide out between their two stools at the bar.

  “I love how it whirs,” Horne-Bough said, his eyes following the yo-yo. “That sound is wonderful.”

  Like the mayor, this spindly young entrepreneur was fascinating to Siddhu. Horne-Bough was not the stingy kind of rich person, nor was he oblivious to cash. He saw money not as lifeblood but as a social lubricant. “Contrary to what you newsmen think, I want to pay for content,” Horne-Bough told him. “Maybe not a unionized shop, but wages and benefits and options.” His model was not just click-driven, but also used a subscription/patronage model from individual subscribers and institutions. GSSP’s initial staff included a couple of Siddhu’s ex-colleagues, including a formerly fresh-faced investigative reporter who’d been laid off before he could qualify for a buyout. Another staffer was a journalism grad who used to work as the mayor’s executive assistant and knew where he did his dry cleaning. “The city has grown enormously in the past decade in terms of wealth. There are people willing to pay top dollar for the best cars and food and sunglasses and ski chalets. There’s no reason why they wouldn’t want to pay more for the best news coverage. There are no better circumstances for this model to flourish.”

  GSSP saw itself not only as a reporting service but a private knowledge hub, a “data concierge” for the wealthy. Horne-Bough was certain people would pay a four-figure annual subscription for, among other things, a phone number that got them a cab five minutes earlier. “Everyone else will get the news for free, but there will be a time lag—sometimes a day, sometimes fifteen minutes,” Horne-Bough suggested. “Others will still get news free before your paper can give it away. But those who have paid will have a piece of—you guessed it—gossip.”

  Between their two tasting flights, Horne-Bough checked text messages on a 2007-era vintage flip phone. He’d explained he liked older technology—not as a conversation piece but because it reduced the time he spent not focusing on his present surroundings, yet he checked it and set it aside several times throughout their conversation. This time, though, he gaped at the phone. After a prolonged silence, he signalled to the waiter for a bill.

  “It contradicts our workplace culture to leave a drink for the office, but this one is big,” he told Siddhu. “I need to write this story and get it out there. I won’t even have time to use my electric typewriter.”

  “What is it?” Siddhu asked. He added, “I can keep a secret.”

  Horne-Bough hesitated. The World Health Organization, in dialogue with Vancouver Coastal Health, had recommended a city-wide quarantine. The announcement would come quickly and leave people with the least amount of time to flee. The city wanted to avoid the situation that had occurred in Surat, India in 1994, when the disease struck and three hundred thousand people evacuated the city in fear of being quarantined.

  Flights coming into the city were being rerouted. Roadblocks would be erected on all highways and bridges to the metro area within an hour. “You live in the boonies, don’t you? I figure you should get a head start,” he said, reaching for a wallet that was stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. Horne-Bough, whose loft was only steps away in Railtown, preferred cash because he’d lost his wallet too many times to use plastic. He carried no ID for the same reason.

  Siddhu began to run toward the nearest SkyTrain station. He was not physically fit, so he found himself staggering at the foot of Water Street. The city scene outside, give or take a few face masks, could have passed for any day in the past decade. The sun beat down benevolently, and the air was worth paying money to breathe. He swiped his Compass Card as he rushed through the SkyTrain gates, then ran down the steps to catch the incoming train. He was huffing and puffing when he took his seat.

  The crowd on the half-full SkyTrain car was occupied by commuters who were bored, jovial, or solitary. There was a couple in their twenties making out, an extremely tall cyclist in spandex with his racing bike, one
guy singing along to music with his eyes closed. He recognized a face or two: people he didn’t know, but who, like him, rode this train until its terminal point in Surrey. They had fit themselves snugly into their compartments of private space, pressed against window seats, their briefcases and purses on their laps.

  He checked his phone for news coverage as the car slowed into Burrard Station. Nothing. He texted his wife to say that he was coming home. She texted back to ask him to buy string cheese. He checked his phone again. Nothing on his paper’s app or website. It occurred to him that this had been a prank and he was rushing home based on misinformation. Siddhu told himself that this could not happen. At Stadium-Chinatown station, a two-sentence item appeared on Horne-Bough’s website. When they stopped outside Science World, he received two calls from his paper’s editor-in-chief. He left them unanswered and the voicemails unopened.

  On social media, there were unofficial reports about the roadblocks and the airport closure. By the time they reached the Commercial-Broadway Station, the SkyTrain had started to fill. Siddhu gave up his seat to a pregnant woman. People pushed into the car, their faces red from running and squeezing. Heads remained bowed toward their devices, and thumbs tapped screens to refresh web browsers. People whispered to one another, looking out from the corners of their eyes.

  At the Joyce-Collingwood Station, the last one before they crossed city limits, Siddhu had a sense of what it might be like to commute in Tokyo or Shanghai. Many passengers who stood could no longer hold onto a strap or rail or pole. They propped themselves against other commuters desperate to get home. They still held phones up to their faces, sometimes pressed to their cheeks. They tapped and tapped.

  When the train left the station, the suburbanites in the car heaved one collective sigh. When the automated voice, heralded by the ubiquitous three-toned chime, announced the next stop to be Metrotown, Siddhu heard cheers. The city limits came within sight as their train began to slow down. Siddhu waited for it to halt, but he still felt surprised. Groans flushed out the sighs. The mood spoiled. Siddhu heard someone complain that they had trouble breathing.

  Five minutes passed. They began to move again. Those who were standing wilted as the car inched in the opposite direction. Everyone was quiet. They were going back into the city, back toward death. Siddhu expected an announcement over the PA system, but all he heard was the chime followed by the pre-recorded voice announcing the next stop, Joyce-Collingwood Station.

  The train thinned out, more or less in the same order, with people returning to their offices and workplaces. Siddhu got off behind the man in spandex rolling his bike. He wanted to completely reverse his course and go back to his stool at the gastropub. He sent Uma a terse text message and called his boss to say he was returning to the office. Night swallowed the skyline, and the city became busier. All around were people who looked like Siddhu: stunned, moving uneasily, moving because they would look crazy if they just stood there.

  8.

  It is now difficult to recall our bafflement in those first forty-eight hours. Up came barbed wire fences and outposts manned by camouflaged men in body armour with assault rifles. Only essential products, groceries, and medical supplies were allowed in after being screened by security officers with dogs. Dystopias were evoked, liberally. Friends and family from “outside” shared our alarm, but we resolved our cognitive dissonance at every turn. We drove our children to school and scraped our plates into the compost (picked up by sanitation staff in hazmat suits). Our devotion to routine was how we sought comfort in the moments after the hot flare of annoyance tapered into disquiet—when we noticed, say, a co-worker absent from a meeting. Or when we saw entire aisles in markets picked clean.

  Once the quarantine was imposed, Dr Bernard Rieux remained busy with walk-in traffic at his clinic. According to the diary he kept, a few patients presented the swelling and flu-like symptoms associated with the disease. He lanced their buboes and advised them to check into the hospital. They asked him how worried they should be. Rieux learned to parry back that worry didn’t matter, treatment did. “Take your time getting there,” he instructed. “How important is it to rush if you get hit by a car crossing the street?”

  He told a handful of patients who had become infected to pack a good book. It was solid advice, innocuous enough, but the first time those words left his mouth he felt a twinge of disbelief. He didn’t usually offer suggestions like that and was wary of any overreach in a doctor’s authority. Why had he changed course? The disease had done this to him. He wanted to offer patients something, but he had no reassurances. His work frequently involved batting away unfounded fears, contextualizing symptoms, and limiting expectations. Patients often explained away danger, and he could frighten them into worry. But the surge of preparation that followed alarm would not do much to save his patients. He had nothing else to offer but to suggest they read while waiting.

  To his relief, patients responded pleasantly to his advice; one asked for recommendations. Rieux named Leo Tolstoy, Chinua Achebe, and Virginia Woolf. “Stick to the books written by dead people,” he added. Contemporary literature, to him, felt too much like posturing.

  His favourite patient, Walter, came in regularly, as expected. Walter was difficult. Aside from an occasional cold and high blood pressure, he was healthy, but he visited the clinic at least twice a week. Rieux did his best to hasten their appointments, but he knew that Walter’s interaction with him amounted to his only social outing of the day. His chart indicated that he was fifty-seven years of age, but he could have passed for any age between forty and sixty. His hands were rough from years as a dishwasher and a labourer in construction, but his face was remarkably soft (more remarkable because of the smoking). And he had the slight, hairless body of an active pre-teen.

  Rieux looked at his file. “I understand you feel you were infected?” he asked.

  “Of course I am,” Walter said, speaking into the fluorescent lights above him as he lay on the table. “Why wouldn’t I be targeted?”

  Rieux inspected Walter thoroughly for signs of illness, knowing this might be the only time he was touched today. (Rieux’s theory was that Walter had once been a sensualist, but had forsworn human contact.) Walter explained that this variant of the disease had been manufactured in a laboratory, refracting theories he’d dug up from library internet terminals. “Of course it was manufactured,” Walter said. “Let’s talk about how smallpox exists only in the world in two laboratories. One in the States, and one in Russia. It’s a fact. Look it up. How easy would it be to manufacture the plague?” Disease had been exposed to the public as a form of population control. “Look at the deficits the government is running. Just think,” he said, tapping his head. “How much money would we save if all the poor people died? This outbreak is finishing the work that was started by the Annex.”

  “I pay enough taxes as it is,” Rieux joked.

  “You fucking doctors,” Walter said, sitting up. “You never get sick. You never know how it feels.”

  “How are your hemorrhoids?” Rieux asked him. “Did the cream I give you work? Did you try it? I know it’s awkward to apply.”

  “That’s where it begins.” He buttoned up his shirt. The thing with Walter was that he wanted to be sick, Rieux wrote in one of his diary entries. I’m not his healer but his witness. By disposition, Walter did not use any drugs, he remained homebound, but he had not yet exhibited any urges to run into traffic.

  “A lot of us are getting swept up in the concern over this epidemic,” Rieux told him. “You don’t have it. Who knows? Maybe you’ll get it later.”

  Walter’s mouth wobbled in withheld delight as he refocussed. “Dr Rieux, I come from a group—we’ve been beaten up by people who look like you. People who look like money. Do you know how many people I’ve seen die? Hundreds. Literally. Loved ones, friends, enemies. People who lived better lives than me. People who never did one thing wrong to anyone. This isn’t ‘survivor’s guilt.’ Everyone says that.�
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  Walter left as soon as his exam was over—for once. His appointment came before Rieux’s lunch break. That day, the second one of the quarantine, Rieux saw his friend and mentor, Dr Orla Castello. They had run into each other earlier in the fall at Whole Foods. In the produce aisle, they made a lunch date on their respective smartphones. She had only two white potatoes and half a pomegranate in her basket. Since that interaction, the date had been pushed back twice already. In Vancouver, the effort of staying in touch and the affections stirred by seeing an old friend’s name appear on your screen before you messaged them to postpone felt more friendship-affirming than actual socializing. Seeing that old friend, once excuses could not be summoned, often underscored the growing chasm between two people.

  As Chief Medical Health Officer at the Coastal Health Authority, Castello could credibly claim to be engrossed in her work. Rieux expected another postponement, if not an outright cancellation. Instead, she’d called to confirm their get-together. “I need a break,” she told him. “And you owe me a distraction.”

  Long ago, Rieux had been Castello’s student at medical school. As a teacher, Castello was a divisive figure. Rieux’s peers felt she rambled too much, openly contradicting information on her own PowerPoint slides, and assigned grades by whim. Others, like Rieux, were charmed by her anecdotes and her tailored tweed suits. To them, her laughter seemed like champagne, acidic and sugary. They became part of her coterie. Rieux was her unsurpassable favourite. After Rieux had been evicted from his basement apartment, Castello and her then-husband, Victor, took him in for a month. Rieux stayed in the guest room. He tutored their sixteen-year-old son, Adam, for his essay on Brave New World. He walked their bull mastiff on rainy days. She would serve him tea and biscuits in the afternoon and they would talk about anything but medicine. Rieux would describe her as a polymath—she spoke five languages and was an accomplished violinist—if not for the implied strain of being good at many things. To be around her was to waft in the webs that connected science and culture.