The Plague

by Kevin Chong

  “No way. Death I can handle, but being sick frightens me. Not having family or anyone who knows me well enough to call a good friend, should I fall mortally ill, scares me. I figure Janice is my only lifeline.”

  When they’d finished their wine, Rieux paid the bill, despite Tso’s protest, and then waited with her until she got into a cab. He didn’t remember his walk home but woke up in bed with his hiking boots on. He clomped into the bathroom and vomited. In a panic, he took his own temperature and concluded he was only hungover (without having had much to drink). Remorse washed over him, a feeling that exceeded anything he did or admitted to feeling. In the churning of regret, he was possessed by a need to speak to Elyse. He tried the number she’d given him, but the call didn’t go through because he hadn’t used the proper country code. When he got a recorded message asking him to try again, he didn’t bother to search for the correct number. Instead he dialled the clinic and told the receptionist he was feeling unwell.

  Rieux left the house to sidestep his concerned mother. He took his bike out but was forced to choose the roads carefully. A patch of black ice would further strain the medical system. He stopped on Broadway to chug a bottle of water and find something to eat. His ambitions that day were to expend some physical energy. He hoped to ride to the university and back. While in line for his bagel, he received a text from Castello. She wanted to see him at the hospital. “I’m calling in a favour,” she wrote. “Actually, I am calling in two.”

  They had not spoken since her tirade of frantic messages. Rieux replied that he was on his way. The day had opened up like one extended airport layover as soon as he called in sick, so he was relieved by Castello’s invitation. He biked along the Seawall, a ride made easier by the absence of tourists, enjoying the burn of the frosty air on his cheeks.

  Castello waited outside the doors of the auxiliary hospital—a wing of the unfinished medical centre that would replace St. Paul’s Hospital the next year—reserved for patients with the disease. She had a new blunter hairstyle and was wearing makeup. She swiped Rieux in and led him to a room where they both changed into protective clothing. “We are short-staffed in the auxiliary hospital,” she told him. “You used to work a day a week in the lung clinic. I was wondering whether I could convince you to work here for a couple of shifts.”

  She knew he would be curious. And she knew that he never declined her requests. “Someone I know was admitted yesterday,” he told her. “May I visit him?”

  Castello pointed at a nurse behind the desk who asked for the patient’s name. “His last name is Grossman,” he told her. “I don’t know his first name. He would be in his sixties. He was admitted last night.”

  The nurse turned to her screen and leaned into it. “There was an Isaac Grossman who passed away last night, two hours after he was admitted. But he was eighty-five years old.”

  Perhaps he was young-looking for his age, thought Rieux. It seemed unlikely that two people with that name would come in at the same time. His bloody coughing was, in retrospect, a terminal event, a flag of surrender from betrayed lungs.

  “Sorry,” Castello said. “Come with me. You should take a look at what we have here.”

  There was a range of suffering here, from those moaning listlessly in agony—fresh admittees—to those who looked content in their disease-racked repose. Castello and Rieux visited the bed of a fifty-one-year-old man who had been one of the first people admitted for the bubonic version of the disease. Within the first day, he had developed disseminated intravascular coagulation—a clotting of the blood followed by organ failure—and was placed in an induced coma. His legs became gangrenous and needed to be amputated.

  “He woke up for the first time yesterday and asked the nurse to scratch his toes,” Castello said, her dry laugh like a snare beat.

  The patient was sleeping. He had the kind of handsome, imperious face that one saw immortalized in stone, on horseback, in a European capital—possibly he was a banker or lawyer. He needed a shave and for someone to run a comb through his silver hair. But this man was one of the lucky ones. The odds of dying of the disease were comparable to winning the lottery; so were the odds of surviving it. He was intact—more or less—and soon he would be transferred to another wing in the hospital for rehabilitation.

  “He doesn’t look like somebody who should be sick, am I right?” Castello asked. “The disease can strike anybody, but he looks like someone who gets all the breaks in life.”

  “I don’t believe in eugenics,” Rieux said. “But I see what you mean.”

  “Victor thinks his DNA makes him invincible,” Castello said. “Do you know that my surname is the Italian word for castle?”

  “I didn’t, but it makes sense,” Rieux replied.

  “Victor’s family comes from a town two hundred kilometres from Florence. The other day he told me that he’s descended from plague survivors. He was bragging. He believes that people with Southern European ancestry have genes that will protect them from this new outbreak.”

  “I’m glad you’re talking to him again,” he told her. “His views were always … provocative.”

  “It’s not entirely fun,” she said. “But we still have our secret language. It gets tiring to ask questions no one else can answer.”

  Rieux offered himself for shifts in the auxiliary hospital whenever they didn’t conflict with his duties at the clinic. He dreaded his evenings alone with his mother even as he regretted neglecting her.

  “I have one more request,” Castello said as they removed their protective gear and washed their hands. “This one is more personal.”

  The man responsible for her son’s death would be having a parole hearing later that week. Castello would be giving a victim’s impact statement. Her lawyer had asked for a delay in the hearing given her high-profile role in the disease resistance efforts, but to delay his hearing would affect the killer’s rights. She wanted Rieux to attend. “Victor will be there, if you can’t make it,” she told him. “But even when we were happily married, he was never someone I could lean on.”

  Rieux knew he would say yes. Castello rarely used to make requests. Now they seemed to burst forth, urgent and irate. He’d thought that, at this point, she would mention the barrage of phone calls and text messages she’d sent him, but then it occurred to him that she might not remember them. “It’s much easier for me to administer an injection or set a broken bone,” he said. “Why do you ask me to do such hard things?”

  “The answer is so obvious, I feel stupid saying it,” she said. She had removed all the protective gear except for a face mask. “Because you live to help.”

  12.

  Megan Tso spent three nights on Janice Grossman’s couch after her father’s sudden death. Three nights was enough time to feel as though she’d given of herself to another without the resentment of martyrdom. Although it wasn’t an entire week of sitting shiva, she thought seventy-two hours felt like a traditional interval for helping an acquaintance through a tough time; it was like a “minute of silence” or “forty days in the desert.”

  She remembered something she’d read the other day: The term “quarantine” had been coined by plague-struck Venetians in the fourteenth century. “Quarantinario” was Italian for “forty days.” Ships coming into the port city had to wait out that period, while flying a yellow and black flag, before passengers could step foot on the mainland. What Tso wouldn’t give to know that this quarantine would last only forty days—even fifty would be okay. As it was, the word had decoupled from its etymology.

  When Grossman texted the news of her father’s death, Tso had already been out on a run to clear her head after the previous night’s boozy outing with Rieux. It was barely eight when she left the hotel. She bought oranges, cereal, and milk at a corner store that had just opened, then took a taxi to Grossman’s.

  “They took him into the auxiliary hospital,” Grossman said. “They told me to go home, but I waited. When I spoke to a doctor after he died,
he said I couldn’t see the body because of infection, so part of my brain keeps telling me he must’ve switched wristbands with another elderly white male patient.” Her voice was hoarse and emphatic. “I don’t know how someone who never left his apartment, never saw anyone, who hired somebody to wash his kitchen floors with bleach every week, could become infected. If he could fall sick, I may as well run around licking toilet seats.”

  Grossman’s gaze swam around the room. Tso forced her to sit and placed a bowl of cereal in front of her. Grossman took a bite and pushed it away. “I don’t even know what I want. Except to clean my dad’s room.”

  Tso wanted to be like the white people she’d grown up watching on TV; someone who could stroke a friend or acquaintance like a house pet. Instead, she placed her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. “We can do that later,” she told her. “You’re exhausted.”

  “Sorry to text you when I did. My first thought was to call Janet, but then I hated myself for thinking of talking to her. I could imagine her saying nice things to me while Happy Dancing at her house. Janet and my father hated each other. Sorry again,” she told Tso. Milk dribbled on her chin. “You must be exhausted.”

  Tso was cutting oranges. She had already gone for a run, and her knees were stiff. She said, “A little tired.”

  “Would you sleep with me?” Grossman asked. “I miss having someone next to me.”

  Tso stopped cutting oranges. “Sleep sleep, right?”

  “Of course.” She started rubbing her arms nervously. Everything about this house—the blackout curtains, the candles—gave the impression that Grossman was not a morning person. “I wouldn’t suggest we do that. Just forget I said anything.”

  “I would like to sleep with you,” Tso said slowly, sounding like someone reciting from a script for people learning the English language.

  Grossman shook her head, though her gaze drifted toward the bedroom. “It would probably be awkward.”

  Tso was, in fact, intrigued by the idea of a sleeping partner. For an entire year after she moved in with her aunt, they would spend an hour in her bed at night talking about their plans for the next day. The prospect of being with someone, of feeling someone’s warmth—day in, day out—was something she craved and wanted to be ready for. She refused to take up more than half the king-sized mattress in her hotel suite.

  She waited for Grossman to change into her pyjamas and climb onto the air mattress. The bed was pushed up against the wall, and Grossman took the outside half. Tso removed her shoes and jacket but kept the rest of her clothes on. She lay down next to Grossman, arms across her chest, elbow brushing against her friend. She felt self-consciously jittery.

  Grossman told her that she planned to call the funeral home when she woke up. Her father had prepaid for his funeral decades earlier and made detailed arrangements. “He didn’t think I could handle it,” she told Tso. “My half-sister lives in Montreal. He always trusted her more. If she were the daughter living in this city, he wouldn’t have preplanned.”

  Grossman’s father was much older than Tso had suspected. Born before World War II, he and his parents crossed the Atlantic—first to Brooklyn, then Montreal—before such trips became urgent escapes for Jewish people. Izzy Grossman left school early and found his first restaurant job at age thirteen, then he started to work in the entertainment industry. He moved to Vancouver in 1963, where he met his first wife and started a talent-booking club. He managed a roster of song-and-dance acts. “But he didn’t like the direction music was going in,” she told Tso. “And my dad had an affair with a chorus girl who would eventually become my mother. Once they married, she didn’t approve of his lifestyle.” He briefly ran a comedy club until it burned down. “My mother had left him six months earlier for her high-school sweetheart. Let’s just say that made him careless about fire safety.” With his insurance money, he bought the house and eked out a living through his rental suites and the grocery store. “We’re always talking about me,” Grossman said. “Why don’t you ever talk about yourself?” She lay her head on Tso’s shoulder. She gave the appearance of being larger than she actually was, mainly because of her frizzy hair and wide hips.

  “I’m the least interesting person I know,” Tso told her. It was a practiced response to a common question. “When I reminisce, even about the good things, it makes me sad.”

  “You talk about your aunt,” Grossman observed through a yawn. “What happened to your parents?”

  “My mother died in a car accident,” she lied. “I never knew my dad. He had always been out of the picture. See? Sad.”

  Tso felt an urge to talk about how her mother liked to sweep. And how Tso had asked for a child-sized broom to sweep along with her. And how her mother sang under her breath. She would have spoken these thoughts aloud except that Grossman began to snore. Grossman’s arm swung over her, like she was used to hugging someone larger in bed, but Tso decided to let her sleep for another twenty minutes before she wriggled out of the bed. She felt Grossman’s hot breath beat on her shoulders. A puddle of drool collected on her neck.

  It would have been a long twenty minutes if Farhad Khan had not knocked. It seemed like he was still singing the same song to himself in Persian as the last time Tso had seen him, three weeks earlier.

  “My friend! My saviour!” he said, pulling off his earphones. His skin was the colour of clay and he had a precise beard that looked drawn onto his face. In each ear he wore diamond studs and sported a Lionel Messi soccer jersey. He held a bottle of vodka and a package wrapped in brown paper. “I come home. I see the front door open. I see the door of Mr Izzy open. He is not there, so I come up.” He held up the bottle of vodka. “This is for Mr Izzy.” He held up the brown paper package. “And this is for the daughter, for being my other saviour.”

  Tso explained the situation, hoping not to alarm Khan. “We’re going to clean Mr Grossman’s place,” she insisted. “Just be careful.”

  Khan threw his hands up to his cheeks; he seemed unconcerned about infection. “This poor woman. What a good man. And she is a loyal daughter,” he told Tso, suddenly sounding older than he was. He moved a little closer toward her and said in a whisper, “If there is anything you need—because right now, there are so many shortages—just ask me. I can help. Anything to return the favour.”

  He left the bottle of vodka and the brown paper package with Tso. Within the package were two frozen wild salmon steaks.

  “I don’t know what he’s doing—but he’s already paid four months of back rent,” Grossman explained upon waking. “And I have never seen him happier. He must be the happiest man in the city.”

  “All it took was an epidemic,” Tso replied with a whistle.

  “When you think of it, the disease puts everything in perspective,” Grossman added before breaking into the first of many teary jags. Tso brought her water and a Benadryl.

  Once Grossman was asleep again, Tso left to retrieve her toothbrush from the hotel and returned with vegetables and rice to serve with the salmon steaks. Then she picked the best Netflix indie romantic comedies. She felt useful.

  Grossman had an appointment at a funeral parlour for the next day. Tso accompanied her. When they arrived, they were asked to wait in a reception area that was so crowded they needed to stand. They waited forty-five minutes until a funeral services agent, a dewy-faced young woman who shared a surname with the business, welcomed them into her office. She apologized for the delay. “As you can see, we’ve had a lot of appointments.”

  Grossman handed over her prepaid policy papers and began listing her specific needs. Her father didn’t want a religious funeral; he had disavowed Judaism as a teenager. He wanted laughter. “It should be in a small room, as my dad kept to himself in his later years,” she continued. “And I want a cherry oak casket.”

  The funeral staffer’s eyes flitted between the contract that Grossman brought and her computer screen. “I’m afraid we have a problem,” she said, turning back from the screen. “
At the moment we only have the capacity to do cremation burials.” They had run out of caskets; new inventory hadn’t yet been brought in. And they had no idea when they might get caskets.

  “But my father has a full-sized plot,” Grossman said.

  “That’s wonderful,” the agent said matter-of-factly. “You’re lucky to have had a parent who planned so well. Dad left you with so many options.”

  The single plot (purchased, along with the funeral, in a lugubrious period following Izzy Grossman’s second divorce) could be subdivided. Some of it could be reserved for Janice or her sister. Or she could sell the land, which had a prime location in the city’s only cemetery, Mountain View. The value of the land, mirroring residential property, had grown exponentially in the past year. And then there was the “plague premium.” As it stood, with other cemeteries outside the city limits, there were bodies and cremated remains that would not be buried until the quarantine was lifted. Muslim and Jewish families, whose faiths did not allow for cremation, were most grievously affected. Mr Grossman’s plot was a prize. “In this market,” the agent concluded, “you would make a killing.”

  Grossman pulled her grey curls over her face and rocked in her chair. Tso leaned into her and asked if she wanted to go. Grossman shook her head. “I just thought this would go more smoothly,” she whispered back. “I don’t need to turn a profit.” She took a breath and asked the funeral agent if they could build their own casket.

  “From pine?” the agent asked. Her placid demeanor was suddenly transformed, and she re-clicked her computer mouse as though she could regain her composure through repetition.

  “I would have to find a carpenter,” Grossman answered. “But we would use better material.”

  The agent excused herself. “I’m sort of new here,” she told them. “I need to consult with my manager.” She returned five minutes later, a smile reapplied to her face, and told them that a homemade casket would work.

  For Grossman, the job of building a casket offered a diversion from the more mundane tasks of funeral planning and excavating her father’s apartment. When they got home, Grossman called a friend, a cabinetmaker, to commission the project. But this friend was preoccupied by the illness of her wife, who had been admitted to the auxiliary hospital the day after Grossman’s father. She then called a contractor only to be told that he was booked solid. Since the quarantine, some homeowners had thrown themselves into renovations and other time-consuming improvement projects. They surmised that the city was too preoccupied to notice that this work was being done without permits. And they had nothing better to do.