by Kevin Chong
Befitting their name, the Sanitation League also cleaned houses. Rieux often delegated this non-urgent task to others. On the first day of the New Year, a request to clean was called in and no one else on the team was available. When Mrs Rieux saw her son with a mop and bucket and learned of his task, she volunteered her services.
“You did this for thirty years,” Rieux said, waving her aside. “You’ve earned your rest.”
She flung her hand in the air. “Don’t waste thirty years of experience!”
“What if you get sick?” Rieux replied. “I would never forgive myself.”
Her nose wrinkled so far back into her face that Rieux could see the grey hairs in her nostrils. “I have lived long enough—I feel like I’m already living my second life,” she told him. “Don’t act as though you are ashamed of me or what I did to feed you and your sister.”
She didn’t give him a choice. He relented. She giggled as she put on her jacket and slipped on her face mask. “I let you sit in a chair and read when you were a boy. But now you will scrub with me.”
They boarded a van that Rieux had rented, filled with biohazard cleaning materials. Mrs Rieux held her phone in her lap, listening to Cantonese opera as they drove.
They turned up at a rooming house five blocks from Rieux’s clinic. A familiar face opened the door: Rieux’s favourite patient, Walter. He had called in with a pseudonym: Willy Love. He was dressed in a white sleeveless undershirt, a black baseball cap, and cut-off denim jeans. He was barefoot.
“Welcome, welcome!” he said.
“Happy New Year, Walter.”
Walter had an attic space in the rooming house. Mrs Rieux pulled the mop and pail out of her son’s hands and started right away in the bathroom. “This is going to take a while,” she said in a voice that was not displeased. Despite her threats, she seemed content to clean alone.
Walter asked Rieux if he wanted tea. Rieux declined, leaving him to make his own cup. Rieux’s patient invited him to sit in his bedroom, which was up a set of stairs. The room was filled with clay sculpture, abstract figures in the shape of bonsai trees but with the texture of sea foam and human musculature. A single bed was pushed up against a wall on which Walter had taped some faded photos. There was only one chair, so Walter sat on his bed. The room itself was too sparsely furnished to be messy, but it did have a smell.
“Everyone else is gone,” Walter announced. “They’ve all died.”
The landlady who lived downstairs had fallen ill first; her son started to collect the rent. Then two other longtime tenants were taken away last week. Neither of them returned. In a less dire situation, Rieux would have evacuated him, but there was no place to send Walter. The city had had a vacancy problem before this all started.
Rieux could hear his mother singing Cantonese opera from the bathroom downstairs. Her voice echoed from the empty tub.
“Why haven’t you come by the clinic these last couple of months?” Rieux asked. “I used to see you all the time.”
“You would never tell me I was sick,” he said, “so I went to other doctors. They didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear either.” As he spoke, he reclined until he was flat on the bed. He traced the edges of the faded photos taped to the wall. “Now it’s just me, and I need to stay here alone, remembering everyone.”
There were red marks on his arms and feet, possibly from bed bugs. They, like Walter, were indestructible. Rieux would call the landlady’s son to ask him to get an exterminator to the property. Walter caught him looking at the red marks. He pointed to a figure in one of his faded pictures.
“This old friend taught me how to tattoo with ink and a sewing needle, and for a while I would give tattoos to lovers and acquaintances. I got pretty good, but I never experimented on myself. I was terrified of needles. And I loved the body God gave me.”
“What changed?” Rieux asked. “Was it the disease? The quarantine?”
He nodded. “It felt like old times. I was watching people around me dying—again. These were the people who did nothing wrong the first time. Everyone just stood by. Doctors just like you.” He sat up. “Do you know what time it is?”
Before Rieux could answer, Walter said that he’d stopped counting the days. “I can’t tell you when, exactly, but I became so sad that I couldn’t bear time passing,” he continued. “I saw the Christmas trees, but I don’t know what day of the month it is unless someone makes me sign a cheque or wishes me a happy new year. My assistance payments come electronically.”
The day the barricades went up, Walter continued, he thought about his old friends again. He remembered, in particular, the friend who taught him how to tattoo. This friend had thrown himself in front of a train.
Rieux stared at Walter’s relatively unblemished body and thought that it didn’t look the way the body of someone who suffered from serious illness might look.
“I got out a sewing needle. I only had red ink. And I marked myself. The day after that I marked myself again. Now I use it to keep track of the days we have been locked up together. If I want to know how long everyone has been suffering the way I have, I just need to roll up my sleeve.”
Rieux’s mother popped her head into the room. “Finished!” she said. “Would it be alright if I cleaned the kitchen?”
As they waited, Walter asked if he could listen to music. “You can wait with me,” he told Rieux. “But I have talked enough.” He found an AM station that played Top 40 songs. The room was warm, which somehow made Rieux’s eyes burn. In the past few weeks, the doctor had shuffled between various types of fatigue—double-blinking tired, tired in the feet, tired in the shoulders, emotional exhaustion, tired from being around people. On top of this, he experienced a state of being submerged. In this frame of mind, he imagined himself as a sea mammal that could hold his breath indefinitely but became increasingly fixated with that undetermined moment when he would have to break the surface.
In these middle days of the quarantine, any word of stemming the disease was shushed away as false hope. Rieux wanted to be impervious to these vagaries of feeling. If he did all he could, he wouldn’t ever need to regret his decisions.
He could have altered his wife’s prognosis if he had more forcefully urged an aggressive treatment strategy. She had initially chosen to revamp her diet and seek alternative treatments before she visited an oncologist, but he could have overruled her. He pushed away these thoughts by working so hard that sleep, when he gave in to it, obliterated him.
Rieux craved exercise and air. He daydreamed about taking a forest hike. But he was worried about what might come when he stopped working. It could be physical collapse. It could be listlessness. It could be some insight that he was trying to evade.
When Raymond Siddhu came to him with his plan, Rieux did not hesitate. Farhad Khan’s nameless friend might have been in trouble with the law, but he did not deserve to die. Rieux asked Khan to secure antibiotics and ensured that they were administered correctly. He checked on the patient daily. The man’s recovery was atypically prompt. Within a week, he was back on his feet and working again in the smuggling trade.
“Are you lonely, doctor?” Khan asked Rieux after his friend was given his last check-up. Siddhu had accompanied him.
“I have my mother to keep me company,” Rieux said. “Otherwise I’m too busy to feel lonely.”
Khan slapped Rieux’s arm. “No, don’t play stupid with me, okay? I can introduce you to friends of mine. Lovely girls. They have heard about your hero stuff and would like to meet you.”
Rieux shook his head. “I’m married.”
“Let me repay you,” Khan said. His chin kept bobbing as he offered him alcohol, drugs, weapons. He seemed agitated that Rieux acted without need for reciprocation.
“I’m just glad your associate is doing well,” Rieux answered. “But if you want to do anything, you might consider volunteering for the Sanitation League.”
This prompted laughter from Khan. “I’m sorry. I am just too
busy.” His attention turned to Siddhu, who seemed on the verge of speaking. “My friend, I have not forgotten you. Are you ready to go home? And when? Tonight?”
Siddhu’s eyes widened. “I might need another day,” he said. “I want to talk to my boss. I should pack.”
It became clear to Rieux that Siddhu had been biding his time. The reporter wanted to know about the type of boat they would use, whether he needed to swim, what he should bring, and the potential risks involved. Siddhu started to mop his brow with a McDonald’s paper napkin. He was so eager that he crowded Khan’s space, forcing him to step back with a nervous smile.
Khan told him that he could not provide the answers yet. He would call tomorrow. “It will be in the middle of the night. Get your rest.”
They were placed in the back of the cube truck again. “By now,” Siddhu said in the dark, “I think I could find the warehouse. I know the turns he takes by heart. He even adds an extra loop in the Best Buy parking lot as misdirection.”
“I’m not positive Khan’s associate was all that sick,” Rieux observed. “If he had what everyone else had, he’d still be recovering. That guy was practically bouncing off the walls.”
“He was probably tired from smuggling,” Siddhu suggested. “Caught the flu. Everybody either under-reacts or over-reacts.”
When the truck’s doors opened again, the sky had already given way to the night’s scowl, even though it was only four o’clock in the afternoon. They were on the street by Rieux’s car, opposite an auto-body shop.
“Do you mind if I drive?” Siddhu asked cheerfully. “It’s been two months.”
Rieux handed him the keys. They sat in the car waiting for the windows to de-fog. Siddhu seemed disfigured by his giddiness. It made Rieux’s skin crawl. And yet he had known about Siddhu’s scheme all along and even sympathized with him. But when he imagined Siddhu on the other side of the gates, he became enraged.
Siddhu drove the car to the Best Buy parking lot. Rieux already knew that the reporter was trying to find Khan’s warehouse. The doctor found Siddhu’s curiosity obnoxious.
“Where do you think the boat leaves from?” Siddhu asked. “All the marinas are under lock and key.”
“I don’t think you should go,” Rieux said. “You’ve been a good addition to our brigade. I would be disappointed in you if you left.”
Siddhu stopped the car. His hands tightened on the steering wheel. “My family needs me.”
“I understand your emotional wants. But people are dying, and we can help them. Escaping would be cowardice.”
Something seemed to back up inside Siddhu’s eyes. Then that thing hurtled up against his face.
“I always thought the Sanitation League was a modest initiative by someone with heroic impulses,” he told Rieux. “And yet we are risking our own lives by going into so many infected homes. You made your volunteers sign waivers. At the end of the day, we could be saving more lives if we all stayed at our sinks washing our hands.”
Rieux did not reply. Siddhu started the car again and turned the radio up loud. “And I know the real reason why you don’t want me to go,” he shouted over the music.
“What’s that?” Rieux asked.
“You need me as a chaperone. You don’t want to be alone with Megan. Because you don’t understand your own emotional wants.”
It took Rieux longer than necessary to absorb his friend’s insinuation. “That’s not true.”
“You can deny it if you like. In any case, you still have your mother and Janice to keep you two apart.”
He blinked twice. He felt both shame and relief. “Does she know?”
Siddhu shook his head. “She’s got other things on her plate.” They stopped outside the city transfer station where garbage normally sat before it was relayed to the landfill in Delta. Presently, excess waste was collecting on a barge in the Fraser River. “I guess Farhad did a better job in hiding his tracks than I thought he did,” he said. He took a breath, then added: “I cheated on my wife before. I don’t recommend it.”
“You did?”
“We had just gotten married at the time, the kids weren’t born yet. But I did. With the woman my parents didn’t want me to marry.”
“Was she non-Indian?” Rieux asked.
Siddhu’s eyelids quivered. “Why does it matter? Just because I’m from an Indian immigrant background doesn’t mean my family is interchangeable with, like, say, the family in a magazine article you read on a plane.”
“I’m sorry.”
“But yes, she was white. And she was older and already had a kid. And she didn’t finish high school. What I’m saying is that there were other things that a non-immigrant, non-Asian family would also object to.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Forget about it. As I was saying, Uma and I were not getting along. She was visiting family in Ontario. It was always easier with this other woman. We fought all the time, but when we fought, everything got said and then it was done. With Uma, an argument from the week before can flitter around you like a swarm of gnats. And so I called this old flame up when her kid was with his dad. I wanted to see what it was like to be with her again. I’d always done the right thing until I didn’t. I remember waking up, going to her bathroom. She had dug up my old toothbrush. I started brushing my teeth. I kept looking at myself and thinking about my toothbrush at home. I thought about how the bed at home was still unmade on one side.”
The last half of Siddhu’s story was told through choked sobs. Rieux was uncomfortable with his friend’s display. He patted him on the arm, but soon found himself pulled into the reporter’s damp embrace.
“I don’t want to leave you all. And part of me is afraid of seeing Uma,” Siddhu admitted. “I feel so bad.”
Rieux felt like a marsupial in his mother’s pouch.
“I do, too,” he said into Siddhu’s chest. “Look, when Elyse got sick, I tried to find the best oncologist and walk her through the stages of treatment. Her friends told me to visit handicraft websites so I could make her an advent calendar she could use to count down her treatments. That’s how hard I tried. I wanted to do all this because I didn’t want to feel what she was feeling. I wanted to help her to ignore her suffering.”
The authors of this account debated the inclusion of this passage. They were mindful of the hurt it might induce. What swayed them was the underlying principles of this story: to describe, honestly and fully, life during this moment in our city’s history. We wanted to show how this calamitous intervention reconfigured our decisions and values. And so any changes in behaviour that arose from our reactions to the disease and the subsequent quarantine were to be included. Even those who never so much as coughed during this period—and that would be the majority of the citizens—felt themselves deformed by the disease.
17.
As the city’s funeral parlour and crematorium staff worked at full capacity, the demand for funeral services prompted them to become creative. Churches offered after-dinner funeral services, for example, and some funeral-home chapels either overlooked the presence of alcohol at their evening services or offered their own cash bars for whatever booze they could find and mark up. Families of the bereaved also utilized unusual venues.
Raymond Siddhu’s experience of the deaths of others felt like a time-delayed bomb. For the first two months, he’d witnessed only the collateral damage wrought by the disease. Since the holidays, there had been funerals galore. The week before, he’d attended three funerals of former co-workers at his old newspaper. All of them were held at the city’s old pressman’s bar. The cartoon renderings of old editors, reporters, and photographers had been taken down years ago when the bar became a live-music venue and then a Belgian beer bar. But the faces—more lined, greying, and voluminous than before—were their own caricatures. There would have been more people at each service-cum-wake, but so many of Siddhu’s former colleagues had already retired to the suburbs or islands.
“I keep expecting hi
m to jump out from behind a curtain and yell surprise!” one ex-journalist, whose cubicle was adjacent to Siddhu in his first two years at the paper, told him.
“The living wake is all the rage these days,” Siddhu observed. “People don’t know when they’re going to go, and they get fed up with hiding at home, so they invite everyone over for drinks.”
“I go out in the evenings more than I have in the past ten years. The city has never been livelier since the night funerals started.”
“That would be a great pull quote,” Siddhu said. “Can I use it?”
“For you, anything,” he said. “But make sure you note that I was on my fourth drink.” The man spilled his rum and Coke as he was caught up in a fit of coughing. Siddhu stepped back and slipped his face mask on. This, like many other things, was no longer considered an impolite gesture.
Siddhu went to bed with a happy buzz. He knew that the next day would be his last in Vancouver. If nothing went wrong. He checked out of his hotel room in the morning, after having packed his Costco clothes in a duffle bag left on his bed with a note saying they could be donated or destroyed.
The call from Khan was to come that night. A more logical person would have waited to check out then and have someplace to rest until leaving in the middle of night. But Siddhu knew he wouldn’t be able to rest. This way, he could depart on a moment’s notice, and he would save money on a day’s accommodation. He needed to start thinking about money again.
The idea of his last breakfast made him nostalgic. Judge Jeffrey Oishi saw him enter the lobby restaurant and invited him over to the table he shared with his daughter Rose, who was colouring a menu in crayon.
“Her school has closed indefinitely after two kids in grade seven got sick,” the judge said. “Her mother and I are trying to make do. You’re acting jumpy. What’s the matter?”
Siddhu leaned across the table and whispered, “I am getting smuggled out of the city.”
Oishi shook his head. “I’ve heard of this scam before. A friend of a friend tried it. He was told to go through a tunnel in the basement of a house near the gates to Burnaby. At the other end, there were soldiers in uniform. This sap paid $20,000. I hope they didn’t soak you for as much.”
