by Kevin Chong
In the end, it was not the images of dying people that made him restless but their cries for help. Some of them asked for things in languages he didn’t understand. They moaned, wailed, and sobbed. He heard them all through his mask, the sounds made distant, like reverberations in a seashell. There was no escape to outside. Others withdrew. They sought private oases. But when Rieux turned inward, he saw his wife’s face. He felt a steady pulse behind his eyes, an alarm. It reminded him that he was letting everyone down.
When he wasn’t at the hospital, he wanted to find other ways to work. He had contacted Tso about starting a group that could offer sanitation classes and support to areas that had been infected at higher-than-average rates. As more fell ill, mistrust of the medical system had grown to the point that people preferred to suffer untreated at home with their families than to be treated at the auxiliary hospital where they would risk dying surrounded by strangers in masks. As a result, he continued to make house calls.
“Aren’t public health organizations already offering clinics and handing out sanitizer and masks?” Tso asked while they were having dinner at his condo. Mrs Rieux had made curried beef brisket for dinner when her son told her he’d invited a guest.
“There’s too much mistrust of doctors,” Rieux said. “As far as some people are concerned, we are putting disease into them.”
The planning session alarmed Mrs Rieux. She had grown worried about her son’s workload. As a teenager, she told Tso, he had been admitted to the hospital with ulcers. He didn’t tell anyone that he’d been shitting blood because he didn’t want to fall behind in classes. He didn’t know when to stop.
“This is not dinner table conversation, Mom,” Rieux told her.
At least she was sitting at the table, if on the edge of her seat. For most of the evening, she had been in the kitchen cooking or bringing dishes to them in the dining area. Rieux felt compelled to mention to Tso that Mrs Rieux was his mother, and that she was visiting—she was not his servant.
“He once passed out during a math exam,” Mrs Rieux told Tso. She spoke English at the beginning of the night but had turned to Cantonese. “In the hospital, he made me bring schoolwork to him.”
“What drives him so much?” Tso asked Mrs Rieux with a glint of amusement.
Here is the question he wanted to ask them both: Was it because he didn’t like to be teased that he was teased so much?
“He has been exactly the same since he was a child,” Mrs Rieux insisted. “All his books and toys needed to be back in their place before he could sleep. One night I asked him why he couldn’t leave them on the floor. And he said, ‘I don’t want you to do it, Mama. You work so hard.’”
“I didn’t say that,” Rieux told Tso. “I just prefer things to be neat.”
Tso had spent most of the night listening to them talk. She seemed unflappable no matter what they said. They were all tipsy on the wine that she’d brought, a prized commodity.
“When he was growing up, we were poor,” Mrs Rieux continued. “Bernard’s father was a doctor, but he died soon after medical school. I was left with two young children. I had no education, no connections. So I cleaned houses for nice people. I would take Bernard and his sister with me. The families would offer them cookies. Bernard’s sister would always take them, but Bernard always said no. He would stay sitting in the same place the whole time, reading a book.”
The conversation progressed. Rieux drummed his fingers against his leg waiting for his mother to leave the room. When she disappeared to get more hot water for herself, he felt the need to correct her misinformation.
“For the record, I hated visiting those houses. Not all those people were nice. I hated being poor,” he told Tso. “I became a doctor for status and money. My father was a doctor, so I assumed it was something I was capable of being.”
“I miss having a mother to embarrass me,” Tso said. She poured out the last fingers of Gamay. Rieux wondered if she’d lined up that morning outside the liquor store for a rationed amount of beer, wine, and spirits. It didn’t seem like her style. The lineups generally went around the block. “Tell me more about your sanitation league,” she continued. “We’ll probably need a better name for it.”
Rieux envisioned himself giving a series of talks on disease and cleanliness that he could deliver in the city’s poorer neighbourhoods. He wanted Tso to organize other speakers to discuss the role of art in understanding illness and mortality. Tso thought these high-minded events would be pointless. “You’d be just another doctor pontificating,” she told him. “You don’t have to leave the house to learn what you’d be telling them.”
“I would be more informal.”
She dipped her nose and looked at him as though to say, You? They agreed to come up with a better idea. Rieux wanted to help the most people possible. He did not know if that meant saving lives. He wasn’t having much luck on that end. He would settle for a reduction in suffering. At worst, it meant that they exhausted themselves in futility.
In any other year, about one hundred and fifty people died in Vancouver every week. At the height of the infection, that rate doubled. Not all of those extra fatalities were the direct result of infectious disease. While in terror of fleas and human contact, people were not living healthy lives. They drank and ate too much and indulged in reckless behaviour to dispel their fears of mortality. They argued over insignificant matters, like driving etiquette. The number of patients admitted to hospitals for alcohol poisoning and injuries resulting from physical violence spiked. An already strained medical system experienced further stress. The rate of drug overdoses, for reasons that exceed our capacity to supply plausible explanations, did not change.
Rieux didn’t know exactly what damage Dr Orla Castello had brought upon herself. The health emergency seemed to bring new purpose to her life. She lived to work, shuttling between conference calls, broadcast interviews with international news outlets, and visits to hospitals. She no longer seemed preoccupied, and the colour had returned to her face. She quipped and smiled as she hung around for a second cup of coffee with her old student. But this reinvigorated woman wasn’t the same person that Rieux had known, nor did she seem to behave like someone who had moved past her son’s untimely death.
On the day of the parole hearing, he went directly from the clinic to the downtown courthouse. Castello was waiting for him by the security checkpoint. “This feels like we’re going on a trip,” she said as she placed her purse in a tray. “Why put yourself through this if you don’t get a vacation?” They were led by a uniformed man who identified himself as a parole board employee into a room with a video conference setup on a laptop. The guard closed the door from inside.
The parole hearing was being held outside the city limits, in the Federal Penitentiary in New Westminster. At the last hearing, she and Victor had both attended in person. “I don’t know whether this teleconference makes things better,” Castello said to Rieux as she placed her trembling hand in his. “The last time I went, I wanted to look him in the eye. He stared at his lap when I spoke. He only looked up when someone on the parole board asked him a question.”
Initially, the laptop screen showed a table in another room. The hearing officer and parole board members entered the room. The hearing officer stepped in front of the camera and introduced herself. The meeting would begin shortly.
The door of the meeting room opened and Victor Castello appeared. He was dressed in the wool suit he’d worn to his law firm that morning. He was a broad-shouldered man with side-swept black hair, olive skin, and small black eyes. Once he pulled off his face mask, he revealed a muzzle of stubble. Victor had once been a member of his university wrestling team, and his thick arms made him look like a construction worker. Years ago, Rieux had helped Victor and Adam build a garden shed on the Castellos’ property while sharing a case of beer. Even Adam, who was only sixteen at the time, was allowed a Pilsner.
Victor pulled a chair over next to Rieux, not his ex-wife
. He arched a brow at Rieux and grunted. “I didn’t have time to write a statement,” Victor said to Orla Castello without exchanging a greeting. “I expect you have something prepared.”
“Leave it to me,” Orla said. “As always.”
The man responsible for Adam Castello’s death appeared on the laptop. He must have been in his mid-twenties, but he looked like a teenager. Philip Nguyen was slight, with a full, strawberry-red mouth and a messy mop of black hair that fell across his eyes. He took a seat across from the two parole board members and was accompanied by his parole officer.
Rieux noticed that Victor Castello’s hands turned into mallets in his lap, and his breathing grew audible.
The hearing officer began with formalities and introductions. She asked Orla Castello whether she wanted to read her victim impact statement at the beginning of the meeting or toward the end. Castello cleared her throat and said she would read the statement near the end.
The two parole board members began to question Nguyen about his background. He grew up without a father, idolizing an older brother who was a member of a gang. He would accompany his brother and a friend as they delivered weed. When the brother was imprisoned for assault, that friend asked if he wanted to take his brother’s place. Nguyen became part of a group that shoplifted clothes and electronics. He made dial-a-dope deliveries. One day, his brother’s friend gave him a gun and told Nguyen to prove himself. He needed to “seriously hurt” someone who’d double-crossed the friend’s boss.
Adam Castello’s death was the result of mistaken identity. Rieux already knew this from news reports during the trial that he and Elyse would read to each other at night before they fell asleep. Nguyen was shown the image of the person he needed to hurt. One night, he asked around at a party where his target was rumoured to be. Someone told Nguyen that he was wearing a specific type of sneakers. Adam Castello wore the same sneakers and roughly resembled the image Nguyen had seen. When Nguyen confronted him inside the house, Adam reacted. He was bigger than Nguyen and was also sensitive to slights—not someone who would back down from outbursts of machismo. Adam was likely intoxicated when he punched Nguyen and pushed him over a couch. Nguyen was embarrassed. He waited until Adam stepped outside to piss in the bushes. Nguyen shot him in the back.
“What was going through your mind when it happened?” a parole board member asked.
“You don’t have a choice,” he answered. “If I didn’t do something, people would find out. And then I would be the one who had to pay for it. I knew it was a bad idea.”
The Castellos listened as Nguyen expressed his remorse. Victor Castello’s face reddened. Orla Castello’s expression remained unchanged. Rieux thought, Were there medieval painters who had already rendered their agony? Their faces made his fingers itch for his iPhone to check.
Nguyen faltered at times, and in one of these moments the parole officer spoke up about his client’s clean record in prison and his ability to calm others. He said that Nguyen had studied plumbing in prison. His older brother, who was already paroled, was now an apprentice plumber and had plans to start a family business. Nguyen wanted to leave prison to join him and help their mother.
“Do you have any final statements to add?” the parole board member asked.
The screen had shown Nguyen’s face in profile. He had not looked into the camera at the Castellos, not even when he described his regret. Now he turned from the two parole board members to look at the parents of the man he killed on the laptop screen.
“Being here, unable to go where I please, has made me appreciate what I had taken for granted,” he said. “At night I dream about running in a field. Driving a car. Being at the beach. Seeing the stars at night.” He shook his head. His voice cracked. “If I get a chance, I won’t mess up. I don’t want to hurt my mother more than I have.”
Rieux watched Castello unclasp a black leather shoulder bag. He saw a bottle of water and a bottle of prescription pills. From an interior compartment, she removed a piece of folded paper. She held the text from her written statement in her hands. As Nguyen concluded his remarks, Rieux caught glimpses of her text. She wrote of depression and anxiety. She wrote about her broken marriage.
The words on the page jittered in Castello’s shaking hands. She would not end up reading her statement. Instead, she folded the printed statement and replaced it in her shoulder bag. Its clasp snapped shut. She rose from her chair and went out the door.
The parole board members were stooping toward their own screen in search of her. Rieux followed Castello outside. She was hyperventilating, flapping her hands toward her neck.
“Let’s get you outside,” Rieux suggested.
She had trouble twisting the cap from her water bottle. “I don’t see the point in this anymore,” she told him. “He can see the stars at night for all I care.”
Victor emerged from the room. He advanced toward them like a bull. “I told them that you decided not to offer your statement. They’re deliberating now,” he said. “They will call us when a decision has been reached.”
“I’m not going back in,” his estranged wife said. “How about you?”
“I’ve already cleared my schedule,” Victor told her. He stared at the ground as lawyers in black robes passed them. He didn’t want to be recognized by peers when he was here as a victim. He asked his ex, “Are you ready to forgive him?”
Castello shook her head. “No, but I only have time for one prison.”
“I don’t want to be angry anymore,” Victor said. “But if I let this go, then I let our boy go.”
The Castellos lingered, drawing closer to each other but never touching. Rieux stepped back to watch them. They looked like two smokers on a deck, their conversation an excuse to stew in each other’s stained breath.
Rieux remembered that the two of them had installed a bench on the Seawall with a plaque dedicated to their son’s memory. Orla Castello had been there only on the day it was unveiled. She said she was glad to know it existed. Victor visited that park bench weekly, regardless of the weather. He sat with a newspaper and coffee and remained until he was done with both. He liked to imagine strangers from around the world seeing Adam’s name on their visits. They would subtract the year of birth from the year of death and feel sad for a moment—not knowing the circumstances of his early demise but still wistful about a foreshortened life—before they turned back to look at the sun on the water or a jogger running by with a dog.
A parole board employee appeared. A verdict had been given and they were allowed back in the room to hear it. Castello stepped away from her husband toward Rieux. Victor continued alone back into the conference room.
15.
From this point on in our story—until the chapters near the end of our narrative—the experiences of the principal figures become more deeply entwined. Many of the events described here were witnessed by at least two of the “characters” detailed in these recollections. For simplicity, the remaining chapters are told through a single perspective but have been verified by others present.
Megan Tso was initially surprised that Rieux would contact her about finding a way for ordinary people to help fight the disease. “You’re well connected,” he told her over dinner. “I’ve seen the way people respond to you.”
She knew he was withholding something from her. “There are other well-connected people in the city,” she said. “People who actually live here. Why me?”
Rieux had a way of speaking that was remarkably strident and abstracted; he sounded like a zealot. Even drunk on wine and wearing a baggy T-shirt that engulfed his wiry body, he vibrated with the arrogance of a doctor. He could be a cult leader, she thought, but, thankfully, he runs a charisma deficit. People simply didn’t respond to him. On his best days, he was charisma neutral.
“I see two types of people working for us,” he replied without answering her question. “Those who are noble and those who think they’re invincible.”
“Which one am I?�
� she asked him with a snicker.
“You’re noble. You have no fear of death.”
“Yeah, I’m real chill about dying.”
He looked almost wounded. “I don’t know you very well, but that’s my belief. I think you’d be okay with whatever risk might come if you knew it was for a good reason.”
“Well, thank you, I guess, for thinking that I have nothing to lose.”
What people needed, Rieux and Tso decided together, was not more medical intervention, but help. The Sanitation League of Vancouver (Tso could not convince Rieux to agree on a catchier name for their group) would provide meals and run errands for those affected by the disease.
Until they found more volunteers, Rieux and Tso worked in separate shifts that entailed different demands. Rieux volunteered on weekends and those nights when he wasn’t at the auxiliary hospital. Often he would escort callers—who usually lived on their own—to the hospital and admit them personally. Tso worked during the weekdays. She had designed a poster to outline the Sanitation League’s mission and distributed it in areas of the city most affected by the disease. The poster advertised a hotline (a burner cellphone that they passed back and forth when one took over duties from the other).
