by Kevin Chong
“I cashed in my Air Miles,” Siddhu joked. He’d heard the legend of the tunnel too. It sounded like a bad joke from someone who’d binge-watched TV shows about Mexican drug cartels. “Sorry to leave, but the food here is getting to me.”
“I know. You miss your kids.” Oishi tilted his head toward his daughter. “I’m not used to seeing her only half the week. I get up on my mornings without her and panic for a second. I think I lost her. I think she’s under the bed, the way my phone sometimes is.”
Oishi told his daughter to wish Siddhu luck. She was uncommonly beautiful in a way that made Siddhu envy women for their ability to fawn over young children without becoming criminally suspect. This yearning had only come recently. Before his twins were born, babies were as interchangeable to him as eggs in a carton.
Oishi’s daughter looked up from her menu and smiled at him. “Can you Walk the Dog?” she asked.
If only children would ask me for more complicated tricks, he thought. But he complied, smiling when she asked for another trick. When he was done, he gave his yo-yo to her. “You can teach your daddy,” he told her.
Siddhu decided to skip breakfast. He didn’t want to linger and wallow in goodbyes. He got a bagel around the corner and started for Horne-Bough’s loft. He knew that he would get there later than usual if he went by foot. Would people even notice he was late or had quit? There were no rules at his office, only expectations that he’d brought from other workplaces. Perhaps he shouldn’t feel so guilty about his resignation without notice. This job had always been a pit stop on his way out of journalism. He’d given himself a year before he’d start to write political speeches or press releases for energy companies. For that reason, he wrote with the aim of reaching a breaking point.
When he showed up at his nominal workplace, it was empty except for the managing editor. Harper was eating buttered pasta while watching a stand-up comedy special on Netflix. She told him that Horne-Bough had slept in. “He has his Do Not Disturb sign up,” she told him. When he asked about the other staffers, she paused the laptop. Two reporters had quit the day before, she told him. One cited stress, another, the former intern that Siddhu once mentored, stormed off after a rooftop shouting match that she could hear from the long table downstairs. A third employee had been admitted to the hospital yesterday after feeling nauseated and feverish.
“Elliot had a soju bender last night,” she told him in a stage whisper. “He’s not happy about the turnover. Were you looking for him?”
“I was, but I’ll check back later,” Siddhu whispered.
He realized that he could just leave. He didn’t need to explain himself. It had become a phenomenon in this city—occasioned by illness, death, and confinement—for people to ghost. If a friend stood you up for a walk in the park, you were left to wonder whether they were gravely ill or terrified of the outdoors. Horne-Bough, thought Siddhu, would be a lousy job reference anyhow.
Siddhu was turning toward the door when he heard Horne-Bough call out for him. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said from the steps to the rooftop. “Why did you turn up late?”
Horne-Bough was wearing a vintage bathrobe over an undershirt and pyjama pants. As usual, he suggested that he and Siddhu confer on the rooftop. The managing editor had made him a cup of tea that he took with him. For once, Siddhu was glad to be outside. It was a clear day, and the cold was on the right side of bracing. The rooftop allowed a view of the city from its ugly side: post-war buildings, railyards, and none of the cranes that imposed themselves on the skyline elsewhere. In this light, it seemed like a place that refused to be pulled under.
Horne-Bough shivered, teacup rattling in the saucer, as the heat lamp started to wake. “I was hoping to sleep off my disappointment,” he admitted. “For me, this site was a vehicle. I wanted to make a profit and redefine news. But I also wanted influence. We succeeded for a while—we had the best coverage, hits from around the world. We showed how news could be effective if we harnessed connections and dirtied our hands. But that turned out be the easy part. I don’t know how people can handle the disloyalty.” According to Horne-Bough, the other reporters had resigned over money. “They dressed it in procedural stuff, but it all boiled down to the bucks.”
Siddhu asked him about his sick colleague, expecting a remark about how put-upon he felt that an underling faced death.
“I was allowed to visit him,” Horne-Bough said, eyes shadowed in sadness. “We’re permitted to do that now.”
“I reported about that,” Siddhu said. Hospital administration had relaxed their policy on visitors because infection rates weren’t being reduced. They also wanted to encourage the infected who were afraid to die alone to seek treatment. Siddhu had noticed a complacency settle in on Vancouverites since late-November. Some of them decided not to wear their face masks. They were returning to buses and other indoor public spaces as the weather had become more unfriendly. He couldn’t tell whether they were being fatalistic about infection or whether they thought themselves, having survived this far, impervious to the disease.
“He doesn’t look too good,” Horne-Bough said about the sick employee. “I was there for five minutes, but he could barely acknowledge me. The kid’s parents were crying. I couldn’t get out of the hospital quickly enough. When I got out and into a taxi, I wanted to tell the cabbie to turn onto the highway and drive. It was the first time I wanted to leave. If there was only a way to get out of here.”
Siddhu interrupted him. “I might have an idea,” he said. He proposed a story: He would document, wearing a body camera, going through (or under or over) the barricades and patrols. “I met this guy who says he’s gotten people outside.”
“And are you going to turn back?” Horne-Bough asked slyly. He could see Siddhu’s end game. “Are you going to stop when freedom is in hand?”
Siddhu thought about it for a moment. “I don’t think so.”
“Is this your resignation?”
“Who knows if I get across?” Siddhu asked. He had been ready to quit. Now it seemed like he could delay. “Maybe I’ll get stopped. I’m going to write this story however it turns out. I could still write about the quarantine from the other side.”
Horne-Bough threw his hands in the air. “You’re the only reporter I have left. Do I have a choice?”
They went in search of a video recorder he could use on his trip, something that could be concealed from publicity-shy smugglers. They decided that Siddhu would have to buy one.
The rest of the day felt like a dream. He filed his piece about the advent of the late-night funerals. Occasionally he would emerge from his daze to panic. Crossing the streets, he worried he might get hit by a car before he could see his family again. Wouldn’t that be the crowning absurdity in his life story?
He went to a local store that specialized in surveillance equipment to buy a covert video camera. The store seemed busy that day, full of people looking for GPS trackers, night-vision goggles, and cameras hidden in lamps and grandfather clocks. Siddhu settled on a camera that was built into a pair of fake reading glasses.
Outsiders might presume that living in a quarantined city with a more visible police and military presence would have amplified security. How much theft occurs in an airport? In fact, the city had enough pockets for would-be criminals to hide. Confinement and idleness drove some Vancouverites into criminality—they were normally law-abiding people who, at worst, stole unattended goods and bought fenced items. The disease made other people desperate. They raised online donation campaigns for friends immobilized by grief and then pocketed the proceeds. The rate of infection was overshot by the rate at which people robbed and stabbed one another. These people were roughly equalled in number by do-gooders like Rieux.
In the evening, he Skyped with his wife from a coffee shop. “Why aren’t you in your hotel room?” Uma asked him as she rushed their sons through dinner. She seemed annoyed. He noticed that she was also wearing makeup for the first time in weeks. “Why are
you calling so early?”
He lied and said that he was on his way to another funeral. He didn’t want to tell her about his escape. That would scare her. He asked to see the boys, but they were too preoccupied with their chicken and rice to notice him. He asked Uma to leave the phone on the table so he could just watch them eat for a few minutes.
Then he found a more comfortable armchair in the centrally located coffee shop favoured by international students studying in front of textbooks and glowing laptops that displayed web pages in foreign languages. He was prepared to wait.
The call from Khan came at ten. He gave his address and was told that “an associate” would pick him up in five minutes. Siddhu stood outside and shivered for half an hour until the white cube truck appeared. The driver had a stringy beard and looked Southeast Asian. He didn’t speak, but pointed to the cargo hold, which was empty. Siddhu climbed inside.
He sat on the floor. He typed a note for his wife, one for her to read in case something happened on the way home. He admitted to his affair. He told her the combination to the safe in the basement rec room where he kept three-thousand dollars in cash and some of his grandmother’s jewellery. When he was finished writing, he left the note in his drafts folder. She would find it eventually if he didn’t survive.
The car stopped, and the cargo-hold door rolled up. Before his eyes could adjust to the light outside, he could smell the trash in the transfer station. The odour that came at him was first sweet, then stomach-churning.
A garbage truck was idling at the gate of the transfer station. His driver stood outside the cube truck talking to the driver, who was sitting behind the wheel. Siddhu’s phone rang. “My friend will give you a suit to wear. Put it on,” Khan told him. “Then climb into the garbage truck. By then you will know what will come next.”
Siddhu checked the camera in his glasses to make sure it still functioned and donned the mask. When he slung the heavy messenger bag over his shoulder, he wished he’d left his laptop with Oishi. The driver of the cube truck gave him a hazmat suit, then pulled out a grey garbage bin. He told Siddhu to don the suit and climb inside the bin.
What he feared happened next. The garbage truck driver extended the vehicle’s forked arms to pick up the trash bin. Siddhu found himself thrust into the air and then upended into bags of trash. He could see a slice of moon above him. And then one yellow canvas bag and then another was tossed into the truck. They landed on either side of him.
The garbage truck started to move. He felt something crawling on him. When he grabbed the rat, it squealed and bit the glove of his suit. He flung the rat over the side of the truck bed. Siddhu checked the glove and was relieved to see it wasn’t punctured. Another rat crawled onto him, then another. He imagined himself falling ill the second he got home. He fought the rodents off until the truck approached a checkpoint at the Knight Street bridge, then let the rats crawl over him until the truck was allowed to pass.
They approached an even fouler smell. He raised his head and could see a barge. The truck backed up in front of it. He could hear the sound of hydraulic pistons. Then he was tilting and started to slide. The rats squealed. He needed to dig himself out of the trash bags. Up above he could see the crows and seagulls circling. The trash was heaped in a hill toward the river-facing end of the barge. He climbed on his hands and knees up to the top of the pile. His was one of a flotilla of trash barges. In the distance, further up the Fraser River, he could see a Coast Guard patrol vessel.
He waited about half an hour, batting away vermin and swallowing his bile. Then a fishing boat pulled up to the lip of the barge. He climbed down the pile of garbage and took the pilot’s hand. The pilot climbed onto the barge and retrieved the two canvas bags.
“Do you mind sitting behind me?” the pilot asked when they climbed onto his boat. Siddhu became aware that he was radiating his stench.
On both sides of the river floodlights were trained to catch escapees. Their boat traversed a narrow bend in the river as soon as the Coast Guard was out of sight, and the pilot dropped Siddhu off at a shipyard.
“Welcome back to the world,” the pilot said. “You’re on your own now.”
Siddhu tossed his hazmat suit in a dumpster. He should set it on fire, he thought. He threw away the messenger bag that held his laptop and carried it with him as he walked up a road in an industrial part of Richmond. He would have called a cab if it didn’t mean waiting for half an hour. He wanted to move, to savour his freedom. He turned onto a road that opened up to farmland on both sides. The air was streaked with the scent of manure. Siddhu’s adrenalin tapered, and he started to feel cold.
Nothing had changed on the other side of the river. He walked until he reached a gas station where he could wash his face and buy a piece of beef jerky and waited there until a cab arrived. Siddhu spoke to the driver in Punjabi as they took an on-ramp onto the highway.
He double-tipped the final driver in the night’s succession of chauffeurs, then felt for the keys in his pocket—he’d kept them there the whole time he’d been at the hotel. The lights were out in the house, so he opened the door quietly. He wanted to wake up his wife and kiss his kids, but first he wanted to be clean from infection and not smelly. He threw his clothes in a garbage bag and placed them in a bin. After removing the spy store reading glasses, he climbed into the shower. He’d been imagining this shower—in this own bathroom—in the cab. The shower head spurted water on him, as it always did. The pressure was terrible. It would be heaven.
Through a crack in the shower curtain, he caught sight of Uma, entering the bathroom sleepy-eyed. When he pulled back the curtain, she screamed at the sight of her naked husband. They looked at each other in disbelief. For the last several months, they’d existed for each other only on screens. When he placed his hands on her face, she began to sob.
He tried to explain how he’d returned home with the compression of a haiku. “Made a deal with a smuggler,” he began. “Then a garbage truck, boat, taxi. Needed to shower first.”
“You smell terrible,” she said, laughing and crying.
18.
For six months after grad school, Megan Tso volunteered at a hospice. She interviewed three dozen people as part of the program and collected the raw data of their lives. Most of these patients—even the teenagers—grew excited to name their childhood addresses and elementary schools. For some people, the act of reciting their parents’ names was enough to prompt tears. Soon afterward, they would open up about forgotten pets, long-suppressed traumas, old resentments.
From this experience, Tso honed that talent for getting people to reveal their interior lives to her. The dying spoke with no fear of consequences. She, in turn, knew that some of them wanted an exchange of personal information, and because they would carry her secrets to their graves, she freely shared her own story with them. She grew close to several people at the hospice and attended their funerals. At these services, family members approached her warily, treating her as an interloper. But in a matter of weeks, she’d learned more about their spouse or parent than they had ever dared learn, and soon family members brought her into conversation, wanting to know whether they had been bad-mouthed by the deceased.
In Vancouver, circumspection came easily for Tso. Everyone hid behind their masks but spoke candidly from behind them about their nightmare scenarios and theories, their sexual prospects, their survival strategies.
Her best friends in Vancouver were Grossman, Siddhu, and Rieux. When her ex-fiancé Markus re-entered her life, she had no desire to confide in them. She liked that they knew her in this vacuum. They were not acquainted with the jittery, self-loathing version of herself. She spoke to a friend in Los Angeles about Markus, who advised her to call the police. She was reluctant to do so. Markus had never threatened her with violence directly, but he trailed her and made it impossible to get beyond him. He would back off for months at a time if she seemed distressed enough by his stalking behaviour. He’d found a line to toe.
After he called, Tso messaged Grossman for permission to stay with her. She was invited over immediately, gathered her things, and threw her iPhone in the trash. The last time Markus found her, he had hacked her phone’s location settings.
Grossman, it turned out, was eager for company. While she had been resilient in the weeks following her father’s death, she experienced a setback after receiving a letter from Janet’s lawyer demanding the return of her work. This led to an angry phone call in which Grossman’s ex-lover denounced her as a parasite. “I was making such progress on the first sentence of my novel,” Grossman said, taking fresh towels into the ground-floor suite, “but now I just want to drink scotch and eat ramen.”
Her current plan was to focus on a new project: a performance space in Janet’s old studio, a tribute to her father. It was one of a spate of new businesses that had opened since the quarantine went into effect and people began a new age of soft lawlessness. This underground economy had been prompted by the run-up in prices, a quarantine-related reduction of the workforce, and an implicit relaxation of licensing requirements. People were working as amateur massage therapists and running restaurants from their dining rooms.
Tso entered Izzy Grossman’s old apartment and saw that most of his personal effects had not yet been removed. Black-and-white photos taken in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century still hung on the walls. The appliances, cupboards, and cookware in the kitchen were from the 1970s and were mustard-yellow and fake walnut. On a bookcase she found the collected novels of Leon Uris and James Clavell. She tried to sleep on his waterbed but found herself seasick.
She laid her blanket on the couch, remembering that he had fallen ill there. On a side table was a picture of Mr Grossman with his two daughters—Grossman’s half-sister as a teenager, Grossman as a toddler. She didn’t want a dead person staring at her, so she turned the picture face-down before she fell asleep.
