by Kevin Chong
Janice Grossman was excited to join the Sanitation League. As always, she offered herself whenever an opportunity arose. Since she had finished cleaning her father’s apartment and completing the paperwork that tailed any death, she had taken stock of her life. In the past year, she had lost both her long-term partner and her father. She was frightened, but she also felt invincible—after all, she’d remained on her feet after the worst had happened, and her new freedom gave her a sense of exhilaration. She no longer needed to take her father to his doctor’s appointments. She could sell the house and live comfortably for years. She could also rent her father’s apartment and the retail space and have enough income to quit her job. “I’m worried I’ll self-sabotage myself and adopt six dogs with special needs,” she told Tso. “I tend to complicate things.”
“Isn’t this a distraction?” Tso asked her.
Grossman swore it wasn’t. “I’m helping other people. I’m spending time with a friend.”
Until she could collect her windfall, she lived off her credit card and devoted herself to a variety of creative projects. She had plans to turn her former lover’s studio into a performance space. She worked on a novel but got stuck on revising the first sentence: “For seven centuries, the rival clans of Mok-Tah fought until the cloudy day Princess Destiny emerged from a dragon-drawn carriage and announced that she would offer herself as the bride to the person or spirit who would join the warring factions.”
“The first sentence needs to be perfect,” Grossman insisted soon after she’d made her comment about self-sabotage. “But all that sitting has been murder on my back. Delivering meals is the perfect task. I need something to get my blood circulating.”
They expected their first few days to be slow, but response to the posters continued to be sluggish even weeks later. Rieux felt that they needed more volunteers and wanted to help more people. It came as no surprise to Tso that he had studied Utilitarianism in high school and read about the lives of people who saw charity in the starkest, most actuarial terms. “Most Utilitarians gave up their own happiness for the sake of others. I think I could do that,” Rieux said. “What I can’t stomach is how they put strangers ahead of their own loved ones. A Utilitarian would donate their kidney to give a stranger twenty years of extra life over their own mother, if it only gave her another five years. That always struck me as a pathology.”
Tso was given the task of recruiting Raymond Siddhu to report on their activities. She joined him in the hotel bar. The hulking reporter was unusually morose and ordered four rye and sodas that evening. (Rye was the only liquor the bar was serving that week.) It was his twin sons’ first birthday, but the weak hotel wi-fi signal failed before he could watch them blow out birthday candles on his phone.
“I don’t see an end to this,” Siddhu complained tearily. Christmas was soon approaching. Moreover, his wife had stopped using antidepressants. She said her mood had picked up from regular workouts. Now she hardly had time to talk with him, and the kids were left to family while she went to the gym.
He also found his workplace challenging, with a puzzling boss more preoccupied with digital security than news. The promise of an ownership stake had also not come up again.
“If he doesn’t give you any direction, why don’t you write about the Sanitation League?” she asked him.
“It’ll get buried.”
“Not if you write it well.”
He rolled his eyes. “Couldn’t you just make a better poster?”
“Touché.” They clinked their glasses. Unlike Rieux, Siddhu teased back. He agreed to ride along with her and Grossman the next day.
When she returned to her room that night, she found a bouquet of white anemones on her desk. There was no card. At first, she assumed they had been ordered by Rieux, who was formal enough to send bouquets. Had she told him about her favourite flowers? How would he have the wherewithal to get anemones (a luxury good that would have to be smuggled into the city)? As someone who read widely, he might have known that anemones were once used by European peasants to ward off disease and bad luck. She would text him about the flowers tomorrow; for now, she was too tired to think.
Siddhu was waiting for her by the elevators when she left her room the next morning, playing with his yo-yo. She’d thought his public displays of yo-yo-ing were ploys for attention, but he seemed too engrossed in his activity to engage in conversations during his tricks and too psychically displaced by them to talk much afterward. She decided that he yo-yoed as a social crutch, the way others looked at their smartphones.
At the hotel lobby, the front desk clerk waved at her. “Did you like your gift?” the clerk asked.
Tso nodded. “Who sent it?”
“He said it was from a secret admirer.” She added that the person who brought the flowers to the front desk did not look like he worked for a florist. “Not a bad-looking guy, by the way.”
Now it struck her as odd that Rieux would describe himself as a secret admirer. As Siddhu waited for her outside, she sent Rieux a text about the flowers.
Siddhu and Tso caught the bus to Grossman’s house. In her kitchen, they made a dozen brown bag lunches for people who called the Sanitation League for regular meal delivery. Each lunch contained two turkey and cheese sandwiches, a fruit cup, Oreo cookies, and milk. They climbed into Grossman’s car to drop off their meals. They visited old Asian ladies in crumbling bungalows, single men living in rooming houses, and the swanky condo of a young lawyer who could barely open the door. It made no sense to help the lawyer, but Rieux insisted that their job was “not to rank the people on a scale of suffering based on our assumptions.” Tso disagreed, and they had one of their ongoing debates about privilege and equality.
Each delivery had allowed the Sanitation League a pretense to check on the client. Many were healthy but frightened to leave their houses. Others lived with people who had been admitted to one of the hospitals. Some felt unwell but had symptoms inconsistent with the bubonic and pneumonic forms of the disease. If Rieux was paying a house call, he would also administer a take-away test for the disease. Even when the results appeared positive, clients were reluctant to call an ambulance. Many preferred to die at home than find themselves alone in a hospital with a faint chance of survival.
Around lunch time, Rieux texted back to say that he knew nothing about flowers. Her hand tightened around the phone.
Siddhu monitored their home visits with a skeptical eye. He entered other’s places of residence with mask and gloves and tried to touch as little as possible. “You’ve spent four hours visiting half a dozen people,” he told Tso. “This isn’t very efficient. And I mean that as an observation more than as criticism. What are you going to do when more people call your hotline?”
“There are still more healthy folks than sick ones,” Tso replied. “I believe there are enough good eggs out there—who can accept some risk, who want to do something—to take care of the ones who don’t have anyone else.”
“Besides, it’s Christmastime,” Grossman added. “I don’t even celebrate the holiday, but charity is already baked into the calendar.”
“Why do you want to help people?” Siddhu asked.
“I’ve tried sitting around, trying not to get infected—and I was suffocating,” Tso said. “It’s about fulfilling our purpose as social animals. It’s like your situation. Look at it: You were doing fine when you were telling the world about what was happening inside the quarantine zone because it served the community. It was only when you were forced to muckrake—to cover the mayor’s personal scandal—that you became overwhelmed.”
“That’s not the whole story,” Siddhu insisted.
“It’s more than you’d like to admit.”
Siddhu tossed his notebook in the air. “Sign me up,” he said. “I’ll volunteer too.”
Tso and Grossman clapped.
“Are you still going to write your article?” Tso asked. “Can you do that if you’re a volunteer?”
�
��It would be a violation of our code of ethics … except we don’t have one.”
Their laughter was airy. What strange times they were part of. They behaved with the recklessness of teenagers hunting for new ways to intoxicate themselves.
While waiting for their next call, the burner phone rang, and they recognized the caller: Farhad Khan. Grossman’s tenant asked them to meet him at an intersection in south Vancouver. They drove to an industrial area of the city until they reached a block with an auto-detailing business and a storage facility. Khan was waiting for them outside a white cube truck. He was dismayed not to see Rieux but asked them to climb into the cargo hold. “It will be a short ride. This is no way to treat friends, I know,” he said with a placating expression. “For your safety and protection, it is better for you to be hidden.”
“How well do you know this guy?” Siddhu said as he watched Grossman climb into the van.
“We’ve seen him at rock bottom. He always leaves you wanting to know more,” Grossman said. Khan had started the truck, and she waved at the others to hurry. “Come on, idling creates pollution.”
They sat on crates of wine that shifted in the dark. Their ride felt both brief but longer than they wanted it to be. When the door slid open, they found themselves in a warehouse. To one side were pallets loaded with alcohol and cigarettes. Khan led them to an interior office area. On their way, they passed racks of designer clothes, boots, shoes, and purses on shelves. Farther off, they saw antiques and, in a glass cage, a large, live lizard reclining under a heat lamp.
Khan enjoyed the awe they displayed at his collection. “We are going big,” he told them. “You never know when this will all end.”
Siddhu was the last to follow Khan into the warehouse office. Tso noticed his hands twitching by his sides as he resisted an urge to document this scene.
Inside the office, a man lay shivering under a blanket and was using an oxygen tank to breathe. He attempted to sit up when he saw them, but the exertion tired him so much that he needed to close his eyes.
“This man is my brother,” Khan said with such emphasis that Tso decided that he was not asserting a literal truth. “He is sick and needs help.” Tso began to speak when Khan raised his hand. “He is in trouble with the law. He is a good man, but he has made a mistake in the past. What is the point if he gets out of hospital only to walk into a jail?”
Khan suggested that Dr Rieux come to care for his so-called brother. Khan would provide whatever medicine or equipment was required. They would find a private nurse. “We just need a good doctor to make my brother healthy,” he told them. “You know if you take care of my friend, I will take care of you.”
“Do you get your goods by boat?” Siddhu asked. His attention still lay with the warehouse outside—the smuggling operation.
Khan shrugged. “Some of them. What do you need?”
He explained that his family was in Surrey. “What’s your price to get me back home?”
“It would be … significant,” Khan said. In his Costco-purchased clothing, Siddhu looked like someone whose wants exceeded his means. “The last time we tried we were almost caught.”
“What if Rieux helps with your … brother?” he whispered.
Khan’s nose lifted as though he was taking in the smell of a good idea. “Then it would be our gift to you, my friend.”
Grossman’s tenant guided them back to the cube truck. They rode in the darkness of the cargo hold again. When the door opened, they grimaced in the daylight and glare of grey ice.
As Grossman drove them back to the hotel, Siddhu remained silent. But his face seemed to glow as he processed the possibility, and risk, of an escape.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Grossman told them outside the hotel. “Once I drop off the phone with Rieux, I’m going to work on my book. I’ll sanitize, too. Is it weird to say I had a lot of fun?”
Siddhu suggested to Tso that they get dinner together in the hotel restaurant. The restaurant’s meals had deteriorated after a line cook fell ill. Thankfully, he’d gotten sick at home. The restaurant might have closed—although people had become lax with sanitary measures that had seemed ineffectual. They had already eaten every dish on the menu, continually revised and diminished, several times over.
Tso agreed to dinner but first wanted to change into a fresh set of clothes. Siddhu said he’d do the same.
“Do you hate me for wanting to leave?” Siddhu asked as they waited for the elevator. “You’ve hardly spoken to me.”
“I thought you were the one being quiet.”
“Who knows if Bernard will agree to help Khan’s friend? But I’ve been away from my family too long.” He leaned back against the elevator wall and sighed. “I want to help you guys too. Janice was right. Today was fun.”
“I’m not mad at you. I don’t think you’re wrong. I’ll just miss having someone to meet for drinks. And I think the judge has a crush on me, so … But you need to see your family. I get that.”
The elevator opened to their floor. Tso thought about the anemones in her room and felt her heart pulse as she stared down the hallway. Maybe it was the judge. “Would you mind coming to my door?” she asked Siddhu. She briefly explained about the flowers from last night. “It’s probably nothing.”
They arrived at her door. She inserted her card into the lock and stepped inside. The bed was made, the pile of used bath towels had been whisked from the floor, and the anemones remained on the desk where she left them. Nothing looked askance. She thanked Siddhu and told him to get a table downstairs. “Order me a rye and ginger if the server comes before I get there,” she added. “I won’t be long.”
She washed her hands and changed. Then she sat on the bed. It felt good to elevate her feet. Maybe she was invincible in addition to being noble. She had vanquished the dissatisfaction that had been following her around in the past couple of months and no longer felt too busy to be able to do anything well.
She was looking out the window when she heard buzzing. She’d left her phone on her desk by the flowers.
The Caller ID read “Unknown.” She knew better than to answer random callers, but if it was who she feared, she didn’t want to avoid him. She could only hope to put him off for so long. The voice was unmistakeable.
“Anemones are flowers for the forsaken,” he told her.
“Markus.”
“I missed your voice.”
“Where are you?” she asked. She needed to look up whether restraining orders could be enforced across countries.
“On your side of the gates,” he told her. “I could tell you needed me.”
Before he had hung up, she was out the door.
16.
New Year’s celebrations in Vancouver were more muted than usual. By year’s end, the death rates had fluctuated to the point that some people were optimistic. Although the unusually heavy snowfall had interrupted the plans of many, the holiday season was not without merriment. People who had spent the past two months in their homes eating canned food now went out to see family and take in the Christmas lights. Some went to church. Many of them had put their calendar-watching aside. They’d stopped waiting, if only for a week. In the middle of the night, fireworks were going off again, startling Rieux from sleep.
On Christmas day, the doctor invited his new friends over for Chinese hot pot. The phone rang as the first loads of watercress and beef were placed in the bubbling broth. Mrs Rieux was closest to the phone in the living room. She handed it to her son.
Rieux had not heard his wife’s voice in more than two weeks, when she’d left a voicemail. It had been a month since they’d actually spoken. Elyse had then seemed concerned about Rieux, but she also sounded distracted, perhaps drugged. She now sounded certain about the decisions she had made and would make in the future.
“I miss you now,” she said. “I never understood people who go on about missing the people they’re leaving the minute they step out the door. I used to text ‘I miss you already’
when I went on a business trip. I was lying. It should take time to miss people. It took me a little longer than I wanted.”
“I feel that way, too,” he confessed. “I didn’t miss you at all. I got caught up with everything.”
Elyse could hear Siddhu laughing in the background and Grossman and Tso’s voices. Rieux told her who they were and remembered that she didn’t know them.
He could have said that he felt guilty, as well, for having forgotten about her for days at a time. For entertaining the idea that her passing in Mexico might make it easier for him to grieve. For thinking of her already in the past tense. For ignoring her system of organizing paper and plastic recycling. For putting her toiletries in a box and placing it in her closet. For thinking of her as a character in a movie he once loved. And for other things he couldn’t yet admit to himself.
They stayed on the phone together for a few more minutes but exchanged barely any words. It had been a long time since they’d been silent together. There had been fraught silences, but this was one of their sweet silences. Their wordless conversation felt choreographed, as though they were both following a musical score, waiting for their extended rest to break before they offered their final holiday salutations and returned to their Christmas dinners.
“Are you there?” Tso asked after Rieux returned to his place at the table. She was seated next to him.
“Sorry—what?” he asked.
“I asked you whether you wanted a fish ball.”
He smiled. “Always.”
By the New Year, the Sanitation League had grown to encompass a team of two dozen volunteers, including a few doctors and nurses who admired (and were amused by) Rieux. Our story’s nominal protagonist had hoped it would become a city-wide effort spanning age, ethnicity, and income but tried not to reveal his disappointment at its actual scale. Tso would have teased him for wanting to become a disease “disruptor.” This was not true. He only wanted to help as many people as possible. It did, however, bother him. He’d thought the League was a good idea.
