The Plague

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The Plague Page 13

by Kevin Chong


  From their elevated perch, they both looked out onto the highway at the commuter traffic that bypassed the city. Siddhu used to hate traffic. But now he saw the beauty—the order and purpose—in the car lights on the highway. He saw minivans in the High Occupancy Vehicle lane and imagined families returning from a visit to grandparents. In other cars, he pictured lonesome fathers getting home as their kids were being sent to bed.

  The trucks came steadily as they watched from the tower. Near the end of Siddhu’s evening, a drone appeared in the sky. It was so small at first that the army captain needed to point it out. “We get one every night,” he told Siddhu, passing the binoculars. This drone was white with four propellers and a camera on its base. “It’s either a single asshole or a bunch of them who think they were the first ones to come up with this idea.”

  For weeks, people on social media had posted about hearing gunshots at night, but the city denied that any violence had occurred, and no one had mentioned anything about drones. But at the hotel’s restaurant a man had been pointed out to Siddhu. He was a permanent resident who used to pilot a drone above crowds of tourists on the beach from a secluded grassy area. The drone, it was said, would drop a water balloon filled with this man’s urine, but he had never been caught. Since the quarantine, there were no tourists and few people on the beach. At the restaurant, Siddhu saw the man most mornings, reading over the newspaper contentedly with his toast and coffee.

  The army captain came down from the guard tower with a rifle. He knelt, lined up the drone in his scope, and waited a moment in the hope that the drone might turn back before he pulled the trigger. The crack startled Siddhu.

  Siddhu grew up in a house with an above-ground swimming pool. His parents had two additional properties that they either rented at a discount to extended family or left sitting empty. His mother drove only German cars. His parents spoke of deprivation in their childhoods: too many family members, too little space, bill collectors that had to be evaded. As a young man, he believed that he was fortunate, anointed by fate to live on the crest of his family’s rising fortunes.

  In his adult life, Siddhu revised that estimate. He saw wealthy foreigners arrive, setting up their children with sports cars, mansions, and clothing budgets. He had wanted to move into the city (and away from his family), but kept waiting for real estate prices to fall to realistic levels. In his self-pity, he considered himself one of the forsaken. He needed only to do his job to realize how wrong he was. In the city he saw desperation and those who lived in chemically blotted consciousness.

  The city’s visible history was characterized by a series of dramatic demographic reversals. Asian people moved into areas previously inhabited by white people. White people moved into places previously inhabited by Asians. Rich people moved into places where poor people lived. Neighbourhoods once avoided had become hotspots for professionals and the creative class. Other homes, once brought to life by families, sat empty as investment properties.

  It should not have sounded so unlikely to Siddhu when he first heard reports about needles found in the city’s most prestigious residential neighbourhood, Shaughnessy. He was too distracted to take notice. These tips came the week that he changed jobs. He could not pursue the story for his old paper, and he half-thought the tips would lead to a hoax or a piece of transgressive performance art. But in his first week at GSSP, he heard Horne-Bough mention squatters, dozens of them, in vacant homes and future teardowns.

  He spent the Tuesday afternoon walking through Shaughnessy. He scoured Devonshire Park, where needles were allegedly discovered, but found only uncollected dog waste. He knocked on doors, but no one answered.

  It was by chance that he saw a man pushing a shopping cart through the gates of a Tudor-style mansion. Its lawn was overgrown and its towering evergreens fenced in orange plastic mesh—a telltale sign of a teardown. Siddhu followed the man up the driveway to an open garage door, where the shopping cart was parked.

  He entered the house and walked into the kitchen. There were bottles and lighters and needles on a marble counter-top. Beyond was a carpeted family room in which lawn furniture and the back seat of a car had been set up. Half a dozen men and women in hoodies and baseball caps sat around staring at the unlit fireplace. He did not know these people, but he recognized them. This was the part of the population that many citizens had wished away. They’d gotten their wish; these people were no longer seen—and yet, they were never closer.

  Siddhu introduced himself. With glazed expressions, a few called out to him as if he was both welcome and expected. One woman who had been squatting by the fireplace approached him. She had black hair streaked with grey strands cut in a shag and papery skin the colour of burnt sienna. She refused to give Siddhu her name but said that she had lived in the Annex area until water damage from putting out a fire in the storefront next door had prompted her eviction. She’d found this squat at the end of the summer. “There’s nothing special about this situation,” she told him bluntly. “There are other houses like this one. We try not to come in and out during the day. He told us to stay out of the way and that we’d be fine.”

  “Who?” Siddhu asked.

  She was evasive at first. Siddhu offered her a cigarette from a pack he’d bought in case he needed to ingratiate himself today. She took it and began to tell him about the city inspectors who snooped around the house as her housemates hid in the closets. They were careful to keep the blinds closed.

  “One day, he showed up with pizza and bottled water. He wanted to know how we were doing. He said that homes were meant to be lived in.”

  “Who?”

  “He had a nice face, but he wasn’t wearing a suit like he was on all those signs. He drank a beer with one of the boys. Then he said he had to go.”

  “Was this Romeo Parsons who visited?” Siddhu asked. “The mayor?”

  She nodded. “I guess he’s still the mayor for now.”

  Siddhu thanked her and offered her another cigarette.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  Siddhu shook his head.

  She said that Siddhu had interviewed her a year before in one of his award-winning stories about the Annex—back when people were still fighting it. “You told me my words would make a difference, and I said you were full of shit,” she told him. “It doesn’t matter anymore, I guess.” She tucked the cigarette behind her ear to smoke later.

  Siddhu called the number that Horne-Bough had given him. He expected someone from Romeo Parsons’ PR company to answer, but it was Parsons himself on a speakerphone in what sounded like a large, empty room. The audible relief in his voice suggested that he’d been waiting for Siddhu’s call. He wanted to speak that afternoon, just the two of them.

  “I’m done hiding. I can meet you anywhere,” Parsons told him. “I’m just glad you’ve finally agreed to do it. Your boss said you were too busy.” Siddhu pocketed this information for later use. “I know from your byline that you have integrity and decency.”

  Normally, he would have suggested Parsons’ home as a place to meet. An interviewer gets a better sense of the subject from their surroundings, and subjects are at their best where they’re most comfortable. Besides, the mayor owned a Coal Harbour penthouse with a wraparound view of the city and a Damien Hirst sculpture. But Siddhu worried that the mayor would intimidate him. He was also unsure of Parsons’ present situation with his wife. Was he currently banished to some bachelor bungalow? In his own forcibly decoupled state, Siddhu might be too overly sympathetic. He wanted to see the mayor in public, making eye contact with and waving at hip level (the handshake equivalent that had emerged since the quarantine) to locals who had been, by equal measures, magnetized and repelled by him. Siddhu suggested the lounge of his hotel, in an hour. Parsons agreed without hesitation.

  Siddhu changed into the best of his four dress shirts and immediately staked out a table. He reviewed the story that had come out so far, most of it advanced by his own colleague at GSSP.
Parsons had had a relationship with a woman in university in the late 1980s. She learned she was pregnant. She decided against telling Parsons and returned to her hometown in Western Ontario, where she lived until she died of leukemia. Their daughter, Cassidy, only three years old at the time of her mother’s death, was raised by grandparents.

  In her mid-twenties, Cassidy went through her mother’s belongings in the attic and learned the identity of her father. “When I saw his picture, I thought I recognized him,” she said in a video interview that Horne-Bough had conducted. “I didn’t see a family resemblance, but he has that kind of face that made me think he was famous.” It was her boyfriend who suggested she contact Vancouver’s wealthy mayor. (Cassidy’s boyfriend, it later emerged, handled the negotiation for the rights to her story.)

  So she sent Parsons a letter. When she didn’t receive a reply, she assumed it had been misplaced by someone at the mayor’s office. Two weeks later, a lawyer contacted her, asking for a DNA sample. She complied. Before the results came in, she received a call from Parsons. “It was like I was talking to a voice I’d been hearing in my head my whole life,” she told Horne-Bough. “I’d heard it but never knew who it was.” Cassidy and her father spoke for hours. They wept together over the phone. He arranged to fly her to Vancouver, which is when the incident, later confirmed by the mayor in a terse statement, took place.

  As Siddhu reviewed this information, Romeo Parsons appeared in the hotel lounge. He wore sunglasses, the rest of his face obscured by a mask and a week’s worth of beard. His hair was uncombed, his posture bowed. He was dressed in dark jeans and an untucked sports shirt. Out of habit, they forgot not to shake hands. There was something unpracticed about the gesture for each of them. Siddhu apologized for applying hand sanitizer afterward. Parsons removed his sunglasses and mask as he took the seat facing the empty beach. The waitress, who asked Siddhu if he wanted his regular, took the mayor’s request for a mint tea without noticing of him.

  Siddhu placed his iPhone in the middle of the table. “Why are you talking now?” he asked.

  “I thought the people of Vancouver needed some distraction,” he joked. “If I can’t save lives, I can do that.”

  “It makes sense for you to clear the air,” Siddhu suggested. “If you’re going to remain as mayor, you’ll need to show your face again. You’ll need to address the questions people have, so that you can move on.”

  Parsons looked over Siddhu’s shoulder as their hot beverages arrived. At first, the words fell out of his mouth like broken teeth. “It took me this long to make peace with what you’ve just laid out.” He held his mug with two hands, and Siddhu wasn’t sure whether it was because he felt cold or weak. “I haven’t been a public figure for long. I used to make money in real estate. I found homes for wealthy people where poor people used to live. I felt indirectly responsible for the Annex, and all the damage that followed because those developers followed my blueprint. I founded a couple of charities to make myself feel better, but they were like Band-Aids on shotgun wounds. I was forty-eight years old, and all of my adult years were spent in the pursuit of wealth. I realized I could spend the remaining half of my adult life as an act of penance.”

  “Did you have to be the mayor to do it?” Siddhu asked. “With all due respect, your worship, isn’t there ego involved in taking on political office?”

  A light caught Parson’s eye. Siddhu’s prickly question had activated his conversational impulses. “There would be if we already had someone capable in the office. Our last mayor allowed the Annex to happen because people like me made him dependent on our chequebooks. I knew how to avoid that. I was the best person for the job because I had the right mix of competence and conscience. My agenda had been watered down during my election campaign, but who else could radically advance equality and affordability in our city? This infection exposed everything that we had wanted to sweep aside. It allowed us to see others—not just the ones who looked like us—it allowed us to see them as equals. The disease levelled us. And after the riot, I had a chance to speak to everyone. And for everyone to hear me.”

  Siddhu remembered how he’d cringed at the timing of the scandal. People had needed a moment to waft in the idealism of the mayor’s speech and unfettered vision. Instead, they pulled down their blinds and watched the mayor dismantled as statements, screenshots from text exchanges, and interview videos hijacked the spotlight, if temporarily, from an unfolding civic catastrophe.

  Partisans suggested that the boyfriend of the mayor’s daughter was to blame. It was insinuated that he was sneaky, greedy, and cuckolded—an aspiring EDM producer in a town best known for mineral extraction. Horne-Bough had been negotiating with him since Parsons was sworn into office. Siddhu could see the boyfriend and his boss operating on the same frequency of feigned indifference and performative anger. A recording of a phone conversation between Parsons and Cassidy about their sexual contact, produced the day before the riot, brought their negotiations to the necessary friction point.

  “I wanted time to clear this with my wife and our kids. They have suffered, too.” He searched the room for prying eyes. Finding none, he leaned toward the middle of the table, speaking into the voice recorder. “If you look it up, there’s a specific term for what happened between me and Cassidy. It’s not the one that everyone used. The other term implies a broken trust between people who belong to the same household. It suggests that children are involved. Our situation wasn’t like that.”

  “I did look it up, your worship,” Siddhu said. “It happens relatively often between adoptees who meet their birth parents as adults or siblings who were separated at birth. There was even a radio documentary—”

  “I broke my family’s trust. And I hurt Cassidy’s feelings by treating her like someone who needed to remain hidden. I could have avoided much of this hurt.” He paused. “But I don’t know how I could have avoided the act itself. I wasn’t ready for it. And I wouldn’t have acted on it, if we both weren’t feeling such … things. I never drank excessively or did drugs, but I know people who have struggled with addiction. And what I felt when I saw her for the first time sounded like what they’ve experienced—a feeling of peace followed by intense panic.”

  Siddhu wanted to let Parsons unburden himself before he asked for details, a step-by-step recounting of the choices he’d made. The public had already received Cassidy’s account of their night together, spent ordering room service and drinking minibar vodka tonics until she felt so dizzy that she could’ve been tipped over “with a feather.” Parsons, thought Siddhu, was a man who could not reconcile personal misfortune in his life, who knew suffering only externally. He would want to minimize this discussion, present it as something that overtook him, before pivoting into his vision of a more equitable city after the infection.

  As Parsons gave his responses, his features regained their distinct bearing, and he became animated. Heads started to turn. People were preparing for selfies with him.

  “Are you still in contact with Cassidy?” Siddhu asked.

  The mayor shook his head. “Why does this matter when people are dying?”

  “Do you wish you were?” Siddhu asked.

  The question made Parsons fold inwards. He bounced over his sentences, struggling to find enough words needed to bury a lie—an ossuary of rhetoric. Siddhu hated having to ask Parsons how he met cute with his adult child. He wanted to wash his tongue in hand sanitizer, but if he didn’t, someone else would ask Parsons the same rude question. Siddhu had no choice. He needed to earn the life insurance policy purchased for him. He pushed the phone closer toward Parsons and asked him about the events that took place months earlier, when people had the time to commit errors. “Don’t spare any details,” he added.

  The interview appeared later that day on GSSP and was widely re-posted, but it achieved the opposite effect to what Parsons had intended. The mayor sounded defensive, annoyed that the public was so interested in his personal life. He implied that Vancouverit
es took pleasure in his fall because it was a distraction. By contrast, the public felt that Parsons’ desire to return to the policy fight against the disease and the underlying inequities it revealed was merely the smokescreen for his personal failures.

  14.

  Rieux rearranged his schedule at the clinic to allow for night and weekend shifts at the auxiliary hospital. On days when he would have ordinarily slid into spandex to ride to Squamish and back, he donned pea-green hospital scrubs and booties.

  The rate of infection had not abated. The patients came from throughout the city like random jury-pool selections. The poor and the elderly who arrived were admitted with more advanced symptoms. Only a fraction of the patients he saw—between a quarter and a third, by Rieux’s count—responded to antibiotics. Castello told him that a vaccine was currently being tested on macaque monkeys at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.

  He spent most of his shifts watching people die. He had seen deaths during his residency and on his shifts at the lung clinic, but not in this volume, not with this frequency. These patients looked like nothing he’d ever seen before, yet they sparked recognition within him. It took him into his second day, while sitting in front of his laptop, to find the faces he’d been looking at in Medieval paintings.

  Where he worked, no saints interceded from the heavens, no demons pulled his patients by their respirator tubes and IV lines into the netherworld. But those Old Masters were not working entirely in the realm of symbolism. In the sixty-year-old man whose body in repose was polka-dotted in buboes, whose face showed agony blanched in listlessness, Rieux recognized a model for a sixteenth-century woodcut. An orderly turning over a patient, his broad shoulders twisting through his hospital gown, shared the musculature of a worker hauling a plague victim into a wagon in a famous etching.

  Rieux saw himself in those paintings too. Haughty and slight, wearing his gown and mask—preserving his own health without saving others—he felt estranged from his own silhouette. He saw illustrations of plague doctors as crow-like bird men wearing black wide-brimmed hats and ankle-length gowns and wondered whether Medieval painters hadn’t cryptically represented the unease of the doctors. In the artist’s eye, the doctor was no saviour but a scavenger who descended on a field of death and snatched the least doomed specimens for profit. The plague doctors of the sixteenth century wore masks that resembled bird’s heads with glass eyeholes and curved beaks stuffed with aromatics like mint and camphor to ward off disease, because before germ theory was introduced, disease had been thought to spread through odours. Plague doctors held staffs so they could point at infection without touching it.

 

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