by Kevin Chong
Castello chided him for being too serious. She felt that he carried a weight that originated in his father’s premature death and later, the sense of shame he experienced as his mother struggled to support two children. For years she had prodded him to find someone to love. Vivid descriptions of fascinating, lovely women accompanied by cell-phone snapshots would erupt from Castello every time they visited. Elyse, the daughter of a partner in Victor’s law firm, had likely been mentioned more than once. Castello had decided that her protégé needed to marry. He’d turned down all the offers and refused the invitations to her garden parties where chance meetings with eligible women could be engineered.
Today, Castello picked a favourite downtown lunch spot, a place crammed with mismatched second-hand tables and chairs. This café, normally so busy at lunch hour, was nearly empty. The menu items were listed on gilt-framed chalkboards. As he expected, Castello was waiting for him, contained in a pool of light. She already had tea and a sandwich.
“I don’t have much time so I ordered. Thank you for giving me an excuse to leave the office,” she told him. “I’ve been living there.”
“You seem upbeat,” Rieux told her. “I expected you to look more like a mess.”
In his mind, Rieux aligned the woman before him with the one he had once known. When she set her teacup on its saucer, her trembling made the china clatter. “How is it that you’ve stayed married for so long?” she teased him. “You must raise your compliment-giving game. I’ll be your practice. The stakes are so low.”
He ordered a coffee and panini at the counter and tried to catch a glimpse of her as she watched the scant foot traffic. She seemed grotesquely thin. She was still perfectly made up and wore tailored skirts. But when they’d first met, she had been fuller-bodied, more vigorous. She used to smooth out her fidgety energy with a Negroni; now she needed to bolster it with caffeine and sugar. She had not been the person he knew for many years; he still saw her losing parts of herself and exhibiting the fixations of a careless woman who’d once been curious and delighted with her discoveries.
“How bad is this outbreak?” Rieux asked, settling into the chair.
“Everything is under control.” She looked from side to side. Then she added, “We’ve never seen anything like it.”
The infection rates were higher than any other cases of Yersinia pestis recorded in the past two decades. The incubation times were double the normal speed and typical treatments had failed. Hospital staff—a doctor and a nurse—had contracted the pneumonic form of the disease. Another several hundred beds had been dedicated to treatment in an auxiliary hospital in False Creek. The number of deaths, obfuscated in news coverage, had been severe. Still, the Health Authority hesitated to order the proper number of early-detection kits.
“No matter what we do, we’re going to take some heat,” Castello admitted. “Some of it will be deserved. So far, the disease hasn’t spread to other cities, but no one will thank us for that. By the way, I’m so glad Elyse is out of town. Even if she is being swindled in Mexico.”
Elyse Rieux knew nothing about what people were calling “the P-word,” in varying degrees of delicacy, from her Mexican treatment centre. She had sent an e-mail to her husband the night before from an internet café in the town nearest the clinic. She wrote about her tan and the view from her room, and the patient kindness of the doctors and nurses. Rieux needed to write back. He would tell her about seeing Castello—or not. She’d always thought his friendship with her Aunt Orla was odd. His mentor and his wife had known each other since Elyse was in diapers. Elyse had once babysat Castello’s son, Adam.
“She is doing well,” Rieux said. “I would rather she do this than see her waste away.”
Castello shook her head. “It would ruin your eyesight.”
Adam Castello’s funeral was the occasion of Rieux’s first encounter with Elyse. He had been shot in a house in the suburbs. There were circumstances around his death that Castello never talked about. Her son had had a drug problem and the wrong set of acquaintances. In a crowded church meeting room, Elyse introduced herself to Rieux. “Every time I see Aunt Orla, your name comes up,” she said. All the speeches made in tribute to Adam and the sight of Castello being propped up by her husband had made Rieux eye the exit. After speaking to Elyse for five minutes, Rieux knew why Castello had wanted them to meet. They were both slight and fine-boned and liked outdoor activities. He was assertive by nature; she was deferential but knew where she would not budge. He felt at ease with her. She later told him that she’d first noticed his hands. He needed a ride home from the church, she was driving, and both lived on Commercial Drive. They bumped into each other the next day. They had acquaintances in common. It seemed unlikely that they hadn’t seen each other before.
Castello left half of her sandwich untouched. She told Rieux to eat it. Rieux didn’t want it, but wrapped it in a napkin to take home at her insistence. They stepped outside, and he followed her a block in the wrong direction. “Is that all you’re wearing?” she asked him. He had left his jacket at work. She offered him her scarf. He declined.
Rieux should be the one caring for Castello, he thought. Victor had enclosed himself in work. They had long kept separate rooms because of his snoring, but he’d recently moved into a condo of his own. Through Elyse, Rieux knew that Castello had collected her dead son’s clothes from the room he rented in a punk house on Heatley Street. She kept those unwashed clothes in a sealed bag and opened them periodically to recapture his scent.
“Let’s make an appointment again for two weeks from now,” he insisted. “My mother will cook dinner.”
“That sounds delightful,” Castello said, but something streaked through her eyes.
Only as he was turning to his bike, after he handed over the sandwich to a panhandler, did he understand. Castello viewed his mother as a rival. That’s it. Once he had this insight, he feasted on a goulash of feelings. He remembered once being in Adam Castello’s room, which had the ripe smell of a teenaged male. The boy disappeared for long bathroom breaks, and as Rieux waited he looked at his trophy case. “Pokemon Player of the Year.” “The Boy Most Likely to Build the Perfect Sandwich.” “In Recognition of Two Weeks Spent Without Electronics.” These awards, commissioned by the mother of a mediocrity, were tucked behind a set of free weights. Rieux would have denied it, but it burned him inside not to have the chance to earn what this boy accepted so grudgingly.
And Rieux had gotten his wish. Castello had anointed him as her surrogate son even before the real one died.
When he got home, Rieux’s mother was on her knees, back turned to him. “I sent your cleaning lady away,” Mrs Rieux told him. She was scrubbing the bathroom tiles with Dettol. Elyse had declared their house chemical-free before her previous treatment, so the cleaning lady had been using vinegar. Dettol was the British antiseptic that his mother had used to clean when there was illness in the house; Rieux and his sister would be bathed in diluted Dettol. He thought the brand had been discontinued and wondered which Chinese grocer had stockpiled them. Dettol smelled the way he imagined a tree smelled to a robot.
Mrs Rieux took pleasure in asserting her presence in her son’s life. She had chosen to respect the chasm between herself and her daughter-in-law and neither to bridge nor widen it. Filling in the space Elyse left behind, she returned the scents of Rieux’s adolescence: the spice of sandalwood soap in the bathroom, bitter melon in the kitchen—and Dettol. Someone could make a fortune packaging olfactory memory, an album of odours.
They had established a pattern during her stay. She made dinner and asked him about his work. He gave her a point-form version of his day, as she seemed interested only in information that she could use to prove that he worked too hard. For the rest of the evening, as his mother knit, he would have been content to spread out on the couch, reading e-books in the public domain. (As someone whose views could be described as libertarian, Rieux was strictly against copyright, but nonetheless felt uneasy ab
out online piracy.)
“Mom,” he told her. “Let’s go out tonight.”
She looked to him, then turned back to his bathtub. “I made dinner.”
“We can put it away for tomorrow,” he said. “I have tickets for something.” He’d purchased them on his iPhone on his way home. “It’s a surprise.”
“Okay, let me finish here,” she said and continued scrubbing without turning her head.
He had noticed the advertisement for a Cantonese opera on a telephone pole between posters for improv comedy nights and now-cancelled concerts for touring bands. Mrs Rieux frowned when her son told her about the performance. The lines on her face deepened when she learned the price of the tickets.
On her iPad she’d been listening to Cantonese opera in her bedroom. Only a few years before, when she was still lacquering her hair in black dye, he remembered her describing the musical form as old-fashioned and boring. Rieux himself recalled his grandmother listening to cassette-tape recordings of operas. To his untrained ears, they sounded like cymbal clatter and alley-cat yowling.
His mother put on makeup and changed into the dry-cleaned slacks she had brought with her. The performance would take place at the Jewish Community Centre. They were outside the auditorium when he received his first text from Castello. She thanked him for lunch—he had paid—and confessed that she had been feeling lonely. In the volley of texts that followed, more messages than Rieux had received from her in a year, she mentioned her ongoing difficulties with Victor, the persistent grief over her son. He had no time to respond. Rieux held his phone in his hand as it continued to buzz. The veins in his neck bulged.
Outside the auditorium, a note added to the original poster indicated that the opera was being held over. The Guangzhou opera company had decided to occupy their protracted stay in Vancouver by working. But judging by the audience—only a dozen people in a theatre that seated a few hundred—their extended run exceeded public demand. The other members of the crowd were like the Rieuxs, women in their sixties accompanied by their adult children, the rest of them daughters.
They took their seats. Someone made up to look like a member of the Ming Dynasty royal court came onstage and apologized that the Chinese and English subtitles were not working for this performance of Fragrant Sacrifice. Rieux’s phone began to vibrate as a call came in. Castello, again. He thought about answering until the lights dimmed. He turned off the phone.
Two actors came onstage in heavy robes and headdresses, one playing a princess and the other a suitor who woos her with poetry. Their skin was powdered white, their eyes winged with red eyeshadow. The princess sang a capella before a recording began to lift her tune. Rieux did not understand a word. As the prince sang along, Rieux fell into a stupor—or what people might now describe as a dissociative state. His mother, however, was entranced. He watched her lips moving to the songs. He had never seen her transported. Even when she watched her TV shows, she broke off to chat with him, rewinding when necessary. Some essential tension was released from her face, and in its slackness, he saw a younger version of his mother unfastened.
Rieux caught sight of a moth. He’d been reading Virginia Woolf the previous week, and the gist of these lines rang in his mind: “It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zig-zagging to show us the true nature of life.” For a moment, he inhabited Woolf’s sentence. That moth was the most vital bead of life.
The first half of the opera ended. During the intermission, he listened to three separate voicemails from Castello. She was angry in her first message, weepy and apologetic in the second, and then demanded to meet him for a glass of wine in the final one. He realized then that he was normally prompt in replying. Had she demanded this promptness from him, or had he provided it in anticipation of her impatience? For some reason, Rieux felt that Castello knew he was out with his mother. She was laying claim on him.
“Are you needed?” Mrs Rieux asked. “Is it work?”
He shook his head. She seemed alarmed that they might have to leave and then relieved that they could stay.
“They’re quite good,” she said about the performers. “How did you know this was my favourite opera?”
“I just knew.” He didn’t.
They returned to their seats, and the lights dimmed once more. They’d never gone to live theatre when he was growing up. He occasionally saw a movie as part of a church group activity or on his or his sister’s birthday. As he got older and took part in after-school band practices, he missed his mother who was always busy with her babysitting and cleaning jobs. He’d come home to find dinner in the oven for him and his sister, who helped pay down the mortgage by selling jeans during the school year and dream-home raffle tickets at the Pacific National Exhibition in the summer. He would often eat alone in front of the TV. His mother insisted that he study instead of work because one day, he’d provide for the family. And yet his sister still ended up the wealthy one with a two-thousand-square-foot flat in Hong Kong Island.
“It’s almost over,” his mother whispered to him. “This is the scene where the lovers kill themselves on their wedding night. Watch now. It is very sad.” Rieux looked up from his lap. There was a squadron of performers onstage surrounding what seemed to be a wedding banquet table, then just the two lead performers. Rieux began to pay attention again, but then the moth returned. He’d forgotten to turn off his phone, and it started to vibrate once more. By the time he shut down the phone, the moth was gone. The lovers onstage drank from poisoned goblets after the last cymbal gong, then lowered themselves to the floor.
He turned to see his mother in tears as the lights dimmed and the audience began to clap. Then the stage lights came back on. The audience waited for the couple to rise. Some applauded impatiently as they adjusted the collars of their rain-resistant parkas. Rieux could see the male actor speak to his leading lady. Their makeup was so heavy, he could not tell at first that the actor was breaking character, nor could Rieux see the urgency underlying the woman’s painted face.
The audience was too polite not to leave before the performers could be acknowledged. A stagehand was waved onto the set, at which point Rieux knew. He asked his mother to wait for him before he climbed onto the stage. He told the sick performer that he was a doctor and she nodded. Her chest felt warm when he loosened her gown to let her breathe. He asked the other performers to back off in English, and when they didn’t he waved at them and told them to step away in his baby Cantonese. The audience figured it out before the cast did. He could see them moving from the stage, up the aisle, faces in their cotton masks. They fled—to exit but also to undo.
9.
For days after meeting her, Megan Tso was preoccupied by Yuko. She emptied the woman’s bag to try to find contact information for her, since she’d taken her phone with her into the emergency room. Along with her passport, Tso found a guidebook, a wallet-sized photo of her boyfriend (or fiancé—Yuko had been wearing an engagement ring), a wallet, and a day planner. Most of her writing was in Japanese except for one entry later that week: there was a first name, a time, and a location.
When she returned to the hospital with the bag, she was told that Yuko had died. A woman behind the desk offered to take Yuko’s bag, but suggested that it could be returned to her family sooner if Tso dropped it off herself at the Japanese Consulate.
It was only a fifteen-minute walk, so Tso agreed. Outside, she noticed more people walking. At first, she had concluded that Vancouverites were pressing on defiantly against the infection. When a half-empty city bus passed her by, she realized people didn’t want to get close to each other in a confined space.
Tso made, then retracted, a number of generalizations about the disease-stricken city. Her first great love had been a communications post-grad who had once, with a dramatic flourish of his father’s credit card, taken her to a conference in Dubai. In the cab ride from the airport, staring at a newl
y constructed office tower backlit in magenta, he sniffed and said, “This is a city in vertical decline.” He needed to be coaxed out of their taxi. Although by now she knew better, she was still drawn to “pronouncers,” even while she smirked at their over-simplifications and dismissals.
In Vancouver, there was no reason to hurry. Vancouverites sought survival—in body, in mind, and this forced them to slow down. They didn’t want to die. They also sought purpose. Some stepped inside a church for the first time, even though their blood boiled as they were offered communion wafers by coughing priests. Others found themselves untangling themselves from long-held beliefs for the first time.
Tso kept notes. She took photos. This was the first extended holiday she had taken since she finished college. Even then she knew she had an internship lined up for September, followed by the rush of grad-school applications. This stay in Vancouver was indefinite.
That week, Tso quit social media because her electronic interactions with the outside world made her dizzy; it spun on a faster axis than the city did. A friend working at a publication that she once dreamed of writing for asked for an essay on life within a quarantine zone; the friend wrote back two hours later to say that the story idea now felt “dated.” But there was interest elsewhere. Her niche expertise overlapped a cataclysmic event—and she was on the ground. “This will make your career for the next five years,” she was told. “If you don’t die.”
She dropped Yuko’s bag at the consulate and returned home to rest. To her surprise, her hotel had grown to full occupancy since the quarantine. The new residents did not look like tourists. Most of them were solitary men. They stepped out of the elevator with stale eyes, and pinched their noses through their face masks as if trying to avoid an offensive smell. Afterward, they shuffled in their sink-washed shirts to fill the restaurant bar, drinking down draught beers until there were only lips of foam at the bottom of their glasses. Tso sat alone at the bar, cradling a notebook and a Cape Cod. She knew she was a target for these men, but she didn’t receive a single unwanted remark or proposal.
