The Plague

by Kevin Chong

  The remarks came from within the mayor’s cherry-panelled office on the third floor of City Hall. The video had an impromptu air. The mayor sat behind his desk, which was cluttered with stamps, files, and souvenir flags. One of the venetian blinds behind him was unevenly half-lowered. Parsons wore a white dress shirt with a creamy blue tie, slightly loosened. His jacket was slung around the back of his chair. His eyes looked puffy, as though he had been crying, but he was otherwise well-composed, and before he launched into his speech, he flashed his white teeth at someone off camera. The mayor read from his text, his eyes bobbing up regularly from the page as though he was a swimmer doing the breaststroke.

  “First off, I want to thank the people of our city for their time,” he began after the land acknowledgment. “As always, it’s my privilege to serve you, even under these extraordinary circumstances. Yesterday’s incident was troubling for all of us who take pride in our city’s friendliness, its inclusiveness, its safety. Last night, after watching images from Robson Street and speaking to the chief of police, I could not sleep. I got out of bed and put together some thoughts. Please forgive me if my language is not as polished as I would like.

  “It would be foolish not to address the anxiety that served as the subtext for yesterday’s violence and property damage. We are undergoing an immensely stressful time. Many Vancouverites are worried about death and illness. Others have found their livelihoods and routines affected by this illness. Many businesses have shut down or have reduced hours. To all of you affected, I want to say that we have not stopped working to find solutions since this health crisis first came to notice.

  “We are committed to putting to justice the most grievous offenders from last night,” he continued after sipping water from a plastic bottle. “The incidents yesterday struck many Vancouverites as a gesture of hopelessness. People who see no future see no reason not to break a window and steal a pair of sneakers. Our hearts are broken like yours. After the last riot, there was a great up-swell in civic pride as people helped repair broken windows. Kind messages were scrawled on the plywood boards that covered up broken shopfront exteriors. The messages all boiled down to this: ‘Not all Vancouverites are vandals—not all of us are rioters.’”

  He took another sip of water and a deep breath. “I am going to suggest the opposite: we are all complicit in the tensions and inequities exposed, not created, by the outbreak. We see the illness as an exceptional situation. In reality, it was our founding condition. As many people know, our city takes its name from an English officer of the Royal Navy. When he entered what’s now known as the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the early 1890s, he’d already been at sea for a year and had visited Australia, Hawaii, and South Africa on his quest to claim land on behalf of the British Empire. When he came to our region, though, Captain George Vancouver did not see wealth and abundance but devastation. He found abandoned villages and beaches lined with decaying bodies. He saw canoes placed in the trees, which upon closer inspection, held skeletons inside them.

  “Amid this devastation, Captain Vancouver was greeted by only a few Indigenous people, many of whom bore terrible scars and were blind. Vancouver saw evidence that there had been a far greater population here in the past—village sites and clearings that would have contained thousands of inhabitants. Some historians now estimate that there were a hundred thousand original inhabitants in this unceded land we now call home. The Coast Salish people of this region were seafaring peoples whose canoes covered the water. Imagine great numbers of them against the first white settlers. History would surely be different.

  “What caused such devastation? Smallpox, brought first to the other end of the continent by English soldiers during the American War of Independence. The disease had already struck the area in 1782 when David Thompson visited. He was asked then by Indigenous people whether smallpox was a weapon of the white man brought to destroy them.

  “Now, conspiracy theorists have suggested that this epidemic is a foreign plot to destabilize our economy and real-estate market. You don’t need to wear a tinfoil hat to see how disease disproportionately affects our most marginalized people, the poorest, the least privileged.

  “I came to office promising change while at the same time appealing to a broad electorate. People were disheartened by the Annex project and the previous mayor’s tone-deaf self-congratulations over reduced drug fatalities. And yet there has been little appetite to follow through on the consequences of such uneasiness. I do not take your vote as a blank cheque to enact unpopular policies, but leadership requires tough choices. It requires acting out of principle and not in the service of a focus group.”

  The remainder of the mayor’s speech outlined a more severe version of his anti-poverty and environmental policies. City land earmarked for mixed use would be designated only for social housing. Anti-gentrification zones would be created. In the last weeks of his election campaign, the mayor had stepped back from his market-hostile ideas. Now he behaved as though the disease was his own chance to smash a window.

  Siddhu watched the speech from a pub, his laptop opened in front of him. He wasn’t sure how a story about it would work on Horne-Bough’s website. His riot article was received indifferently by his boss, who did not even bother to offer it first to his subscribers. “I’m glad you’re here to round out our coverage,” he said. “No one can call us mere gossip-mongers.”

  Siddhu had finished half his article when he was called in by Horne-Bough. His young employer was dressed in a cream hoodie that made his soft skin look like bleached paper. “We got the story we’ve been hunting down—and, before you ask, it wasn’t cheap,” he said. “The lawyers have looked at it. Now we need an extra set of eyes on this to make sure we haven’t split any infinitives.”

  According to this report, released only to subscribers, a twenty-eight-year-old woman claiming to be Parsons’ biological daughter (her existence had been concealed from Parsons by her birth mother, who died when she was a child) described having sexual contact with the mayor earlier that year. The story would be shared with non-subscribers an hour later.

  “Guess who we want to contact the mayor for comment?” Horne-Bough said with a smile. He handed him his flip phone. It was already ringing.

  Part Three

  11.

  This section of the story takes place over a long, cold winter. Lifelong Vancouverites tolerated snow once a year as long as the rains flushed it away by nightfall. This year, the first of several snowfalls came over three days in late November, the flakes thick like candlewax, and stuck to the ground. In the evenings that followed it turned to ice in sub-zero temperatures before being recoated in snow. As usual, cars fishtailed on the road. Reactions to the weather were even more drastic than usual. Sidewalks went unshovelled. Road salt became scarce. People no longer took pleasure in venting about the city’s inadequate road-clearing strategies. Some welcomed the snow as another excuse to remain housebound. They saw the cold as a disease killer and only wished it was colder. Others took it in stride as yet another burden to carry.

  The death toll rose sharply as Vancouverites neared the end of the first month of quarantine. There were fifteen and then twenty-five recorded deaths in the first two weeks of the quarantine. By its fifth week, as we entered the first week of December, there were a hundred and twelve deaths. None of these figures were available at the time to the general public, as officials obfuscated and hedged. But we became aware of the steep rise in fatalities by the numbers of friends of friends, then friends, who began to display symptoms. We noticed the silence of acquaintances who were otherwise vocal on social media. New faces ran our scant groceries through the register.

  People who were admitted to the hospital were placed in a special unit that became, by the end of that first month, overwhelmed and crowded. They were treated by nurses and doctors in full-body protective gear. Reports about the drastic procedures in place to contain the disease frightened many locals, even when they didn’t exhibit symptoms. T
hose who were admitted to the hospital were isolated. Asymptomatic Vancouverites who shared homes with patients infected with the disease were told to remain housebound for a week until they were in the clear.

  Authorities, including Dr Bernard Rieux’s friend Dr Orla Castello, did not know what to make of this outbreak and took extreme measures. If they knew the rate at which infection would spread, they might not have been so scrupulous. Having read articles about the efficiency of quarantine, Rieux decided that any effort to seal plague patients from the outside world was ineffective and a violation of personal freedom. He did not share this opinion widely, but perhaps it was revealed in his manner. To outsiders, he seemed aloof and awkward but also independent-minded. Perhaps this explained why he found himself paying unofficial house calls.

  The first request came from Megan Tso. Rieux was brushing his teeth before bed when his phone rang. “You’re the only person I could think of,” she told him. She was calling on behalf of a friend whose father had been feeling unwell.

  Rieux later admitted that he found Tso amusing. On the phone, he merely grunted and asked for the patient’s address. He told his mother that he was seeing a patient (without mentioning she was the woman from the airport). He got dressed, slipped on a pair of hiking boots, and walked thirty minutes through another flurry. The fresh powder provided traction on the unshovelled sidewalks and icy patches along the side streets. With road salt in short supply, people had begun stealing beach sand to line the roads.

  Tso, shivering in a black leather jacket, was waiting for him outside the door of an older house next to a papered-over storefront. She led him to the ground-floor suite where Isaac “Izzy” Grossman lived. The old man wore a bathrobe and lay on a lime-green tweed couch. Tso introduced Rieux to him and to his daughter Janice. Izzy looked at Rieux, who was preoccupied with his gloves and face mask, and then to his daughter. He groaned as he planted one foot on the chipped hardwood floor, then the other, exposing his genitalia.

  Rieux discussed Mr Grossman’s symptoms with his daughter. He’d been weak and feverish since the morning and said that he was tired. Janice Grossman called Tso when her father began to spit up blood. “He needs to go to the hospital and get put on antibiotics,” Rieux said. “They haven’t proven as effective as usual. But the chances that he will die without them are near certain.”

  Mr Grossman shook his head. “It’s a butcher shop there,” he croaked.

  “There must be another way,” Tso suggested. “Can we just get the antibiotics from the drug store and give them to him?”

  Rieux shook his head. “He has to be monitored closely.”

  “We can do that,” Grossman insisted. “I’m out of work. What else am I going to do? Please, doctor. There’s a reason why we called you.”

  Rieux said he would wait until the ambulance arrived. When he saw the red lights of the vehicle outside, Mr Grossman began to weep. His daughter was in his bedroom, opening drawers and closets in a flurry of motion in an attempt to gather his things. Mr Grossman dropped to the floor in a fetal position. Two paramedics, dressed from head to toe in protective gear, picked him up under each arm, lifted him onto a stretcher, and carried him out the door. Rieux identified himself to one paramedic, whose eyes seemed small within an oversized face mask, and offered a rundown of Mr Grossman’s symptoms.

  When Janice Grossman followed Rieux with some of her father’s possessions in a reusable shopping bag, Izzy raised his arm.

  “Don’t come with me,” Mr Grossman told her. “Don’t visit me.”

  She became immobile. Was he upset at her? Was he trying to save her? Rieux could not tell. Grossman looked to her friend. “Of course you should go,” Tso told her. She took her by the arm and hurried her in the direction of the ambulance. Rieux moved ahead of them. From the door, he yelled at one of the paramedics to wait for her.

  Rieux and Tso stood in the snow and watched the ambulance disappear. After some careful hand washing with the sanitizer he brought with him, Rieux exchanged his mask for a toque. Tso was already wearing her jacket as she held open the door. She thanked him for coming on short notice. “Which way are you going?” she asked.

  He pointed in one direction; she was going in the other. She’d walk with him anyhow. Under a streetlight, he noticed the freckles on her nose and her wide cheekbones. She seemed to him like someone who was tired of being pretty, who downplayed her looks—an attitude and behaviour that served as an erotic dog whistle to a particular kind of person. “I’ve got nothing better to do,” she said. “It’s funny how time works. We’re all worried about our lives being dramatically shortened, but in the meanwhile, we just wait, playing video games.”

  “I wish I could take a break,” he said.

  “But you’re not someone who takes vacations, am I right?”

  “Not true,” he blurted out. “My wife and I cycled through the Swiss Alps two years ago. The year before that we hiked the West Coast Trail.”

  She laughed. “How many calories did you burn?”

  Along Main Street, there seemed to be more people but less traffic than usual at this time of night. Some businesses had posted signs apologizing, in neighbourly language, for temporarily closing. Others kept their doors open, despite a lack of customer interest or inventory, to maintain normalcy. They passed a sandwich board outside one restaurant that had this message written in chalk: “We still have wine (for now). Come inside!”

  Tso offered to buy Rieux a glass of wine, and he hesitated only for a moment before he followed her inside. The restaurant was full of people still wearing jackets, the ice half-melted on their boots, and the music evoked his idea of a European discotheque in the 1970s. The server, a tall, tanned woman in latex gloves, recognized Tso, who shrieked in surprise and asked her about her massage school training. After they finished chatting, she handed them menus and wine lists with items struck out with black marker. His eyes were drawn to the black lines. The missing text looked like classified information. “I’m sorry,” the server, whom Tso introduced as Gudrun, told her. “But we ran out of the tempranillo yesterday.”

  “Are you picky about red wine?” Tso asked Rieux. He shook his head. She looked relieved. Tso picked one of the remaining wines and the waitress took their menus.

  “Do you come to Vancouver often?” he asked her. “How do you know everyone?”

  She told him it was only her second visit to the city. “I don’t know anyone here. I met Janice when I arrived a month ago. She’s become my Vancouver sister—or daughter. And the waitress, I met her the other day—it’s a long story. She didn’t even tell me she worked here.” The server brought a half-carafe of wine and two glasses. Tso poured. “It’s actually easy to make friends. We’re all going through something momentous and unique. I have no one here who I know well, who understands. I’ve chatted with my aunt and my friends back home, but it’s stilted. They don’t know what’s going on in this place, and I can’t describe it to them.”

  “It’s easy to make friends when strangers want to talk to you,” he told her. He regretted that his statement sounded like an accusation. He was tired and would have blown off Tso’s request if it had come from anyone else, but her charisma compelled him, in part, because it was the inverse of his. Even as a child, he couldn’t make friends, and in university did his lab projects un-partnered. He compensated by joining clubs and playing team sports. He became a general practitioner, not a researcher—a better fit for his solitary temperament and idealism—so he could have the chance to speak to people. “It’s a talent I don’t have,” he admitted.

  “It can be a curse,” she told him. “You’re always promising people—without even promising them—more than you can deliver.” She made so much eye contact, it felt like she was showing off.

  “But people beg me to make promises—to predict outcomes, to give assurances,” he said, turning to his glass. He downed the wine in a gulp. “At least that’s how it is in my line of work.”

  “Are you w
orried you’ll get sick?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I take every precaution. If I get sick, it will be because I am doing my work.” Her attention drifted to the candle between them, which allowed him to continue thinking through her question. “I see patients, good people who have led healthy lives, fall ill for no reason other than genetics or bad luck. Dropping dead during this quarantine would at least serve some purpose.”

  “I’m not worried about dying. I wrote a book about it—”

  “I haven’t read it. Sorry.”

  “I’m not book-shaming you. The gist of the book was, dying gives life meaning. We clear space and feed the earth when we pass on.”

  “That’s common sense,” he blurted out, then realized how rude he sounded. “Sorry, that didn’t—”

  “The wine’s really gotten to your head,” she told him, pouring the rest of the carafe into his glass. “Yes, you’re right, the book doesn’t reshape the history of thought. But what I was trying to do was shift, in a small way, our collective mindsets. I told readers to start planning their funerals in their thirties, not when they’re in their eighties and on their deathbeds. I wanted them to think about the people they leave behind—family, friends—as a gift.”

  “So you’re in good shape for this epidemic?” he asked her.