by Kevin Chong
In the morning, Rieux appeared at the front door. He’d taken the day off from the clinic and wanted to accompany her on her Sanitation League shift. He wondered why she’d gotten rid of her phone and checked out of the hotel room. She could have dodged the question today, but not indefinitely.
“My ex-fiancé has come to Vancouver,” she told him. “He’s been giving me trouble since we split a year ago.”
Rieux’s expression remain unchanged.
“It must be easier to come into the city than to leave it,” Rieux said. He waited a moment. Then he added, “Do you want to talk about it?”
She shook her head. “Maybe later.”
They spent their morning delivering meals. The last one had to be taken to a woman who lived on a houseboat on Granville Island. She was caring for her mother who had fallen ill but refused treatment. Tso had seen the old woman a couple of times in the past month, groaning from within her daughter’s bedroom.
The houseboat was clad in corrugated aluminum. The windows facing the icy-slick boardwalk were portholes. On the rooftop was a weather vane. The daughter welcomed them inside. “She passed away this morning,” she told them.
The houseboat had polished hardwood floors, a granite kitchen island, and a baby grand piano. The old woman’s body was still in the room behind a closed door. Her death was not unexpected, but it had been sudden.
“I guess you don’t have to come by tomorrow—to help us,” she told Rieux, who nodded gravely. Tso looked at the doctor but he offered no explanations. Then the idea of what “help” might have entailed fluttered against her mind. She fought back her reaction.
The daughter asked them to wait with her until her mother’s body was taken away. She conformed to the expectations one might have about a woman who lived on a houseboat. In her forties, she was sensible in practice, eccentric in outlook. Her face was sun-creased but finely featured. She probably had a source of wealth that allowed her to project comfort. It surprised Tso that this woman would call the Sanitation League for help with cleaning and lunches instead of hiring a maid. Tso offered to make her tea. She felt the need to serve her.
“My mother was a remarkable woman,” the woman told them at her kitchen table. “She had lost my older brother in a swimming accident before I was born. Then my father died when I was still a toddler. She had to raise me alone. I once asked her how she got through it. She said she went to church every week. I think that’s where she must have caught the disease. She wrote letters every day to friends around the world. She always tried to remember the happy moments—suffering was the other side of the coin. And all of it was like a grain of sand on a beach. She used those exact words. In the last hour, she no longer seemed to be in pain. I played her favourite Sinatra records and everything within her quieted.”
From this woman’s table they had a view of the deck and the ocean kayak tied to its railing like a leashed pet. Beyond it was False Creek and the grey, ever-churning water. On the other side of False Creek were the glass condo towers of the downtown peninsula. Two paddleboarders came into view. They caught sight of the woman at the table and waved to her.
“You think you’re alone, and then the paddleboarders appear,” the woman said. “Sometimes they seem to be looking for me. I’m a little disappointed when they float by without a hello.”
The old woman’s body was collected. Rieux and Tso bid farewell to her daughter. Afterward, they walked to the market for lunch. Most of the vendor stalls, the ones that sold chocolates and salmon jerky to tourists, were empty. They got clam chowder and half sandwiches and sat outside with the seagulls.
“Did we accomplish anything?” Tso asked.
“We tried,” Rieux said. “We accomplished an attempt.”
He threw the crust of his bread for the seagulls. She knew him well enough to know that he did not like bread crust. But not well enough to know the name of his wife.
They watched the seagulls gather around the crust and he threw them another piece. “I was supposed to administer a lethal injection for her mother tomorrow,” he admitted to Tso. “They had someone else in place to do it. They had the official approval and documentation for medical assistance in dying. But the doctor they had picked fell ill, and not every doctor will do it. They asked me because they couldn’t find anyone else.”
“I gathered,” she said. “I thought you were opposed to people dying. Don’t you want people to fight?”
“My choice for the woman’s mother would have been for her to go to the hospital. Her choice was to die in her daughter’s bed. It’s her choice—by law.”
“I know the law in this country. It’s relatively new. But what about you? Isn’t your job to prolong life?” she asked him. “Isn’t that the oath you took?”
His grip on the paper cup of tea tightened. “I took on this job for status to avenge my mother’s poverty. I’m no saint. But I developed my own appreciation for medicine as I practiced it. Why am I setting a broken bone? Or why do I prescribe medication for cholesterol? It’s not about healing. I don’t have a view of life in an abstract sense. I don’t care when it begins or how precious it is compared to a gorilla’s. I just want to help people.”
She liked how his eyes caught light in mid-speech. He became engrossed when he spoke like that, searching for arguments from a bookcase in his mind.
“I read somewhere that the ability to take your own life is the kind of escape clause that makes anything bearable,” Tso suggested.
“Only if you don’t have strict religious beliefs.”
“Was that woman religious? Maybe it was an act of God that allowed her to die on her own, without a doctor’s assistance. She got her wish without committing a mortal sin.”
“Are you religious?” he asked.
“I think of myself as agnostic.”
“There’s no such thing. Either you believe or you don’t.”
“My aunt took me to Sunday school, and I cannot get those stories out of my head. Isn’t it possible not to believe in God but still feel his influence?”
“Dostoyevsky would agree with you.” He sighed. “Anyhow, I’m glad I didn’t have to give a lethal injection. I wasn’t looking forward to it.”
The paddleboarders came into view from under the Granville Street Bridge. “I used to think people who were into paddleboarding looked stupid. Are you surfing or are you canoeing? Pick a lane,” Tso said. “Now they seem different. They look brave: ‘We won’t let a pandemic interfere with our indecisive recreational activity.’”
Rieux waved to the paddleboarders. They waved back. “I’ve always wanted to try it out,” he said, looking at her with a raised eyebrow.
They found the aqua-sports rental facility. Lessons were two hours long but not being offered in the winter. Rieux lied and said they’d paddleboarded before. The person behind the counter looked at Tso’s skinny jeans and leather boots, but he didn’t say anything. He slid the two waiver forms toward them.
Rieux paid for the rental of two paddleboards, paddles, and wetsuits. They changed at the rental place and left their clothes there. She watched him carry his paddleboard. This is a bad idea. He didn’t look like he knew how to carry it. They headed toward the marina and walked to the end of a boardwalk where Rieux stopped to look at his phone. He had Googled “how to paddleboard.”
“It’s simple,” he announced afterward, snapping his lifejacket in place. “Let me try it first.” He lay his board down on the water. Then he picked it up and pointed it in the opposite direction. He reached for a springy leash attached to the board and cuffed it around his ankle. Dropping to his knees on the boardwalk, he crawled over to the board.
Rieux’s features and manner were, if not exactly WASP-y, then de-ethnicized. It took this attempt at water sports to remind Tso that he had to cultivate his whiteness, that he took pains to behave as though he hadn’t been raised by a poorly educated Chinese woman.
Still on his knees, he paddled away from the dock. He looked like he w
as impaling the water, and the loop that he took was awkward. Eventually, though, he stood, wobbly at first, then confident. He looked the way a boy does before he learns to draw the curtains on his face.
“Now it’s your turn,” he told her. “It’s easy.”
She dropped her board into the water but couldn’t get over its bobbing. She had gone surfing before, she’d ziplined. And now she was stuck in an infectious disease zone, and her maniacal ex-fiancé had just come into town. Why am I afraid of this? she thought. She pulled her board back in.
“I don’t think I want to,” she said. “I’ve done enough that scares me.”
He nodded, but stayed in the water, looping. “What part of it scares you?”
“Standing.”
He brought his board alongside the dock, steadying it with his paddle. “Let me give you a ride. You don’t have to, but …”
She cautiously climbed aboard his paddleboard, facing forward in front of him and kneeling. He paddled away from the sailboats and yachts and toward the Burrard Street bridge, but soon they doubled back and under the shadow of the Granville Street Bridge. Still on her knees, she lowered herself to get as close as she could to being eye-level with the water.
“Imagine how nice this would be if we were doing it in July,” he said. “How are you faring?”
“Up and down,” she admitted.
And then she told him about a doomed relationship with someone whose violence was made worse because he’d never physically hurt her. In the rambling voicemails he’d leave in the past year, he talked about wanting to put them out of pain with the compassionate tones of a veterinarian used to reasoning with besotted dog owners. Every time she said “I,” he would say “we.” Markus told her she was pushing him away because of what happened to her own family. And while it was true she pushed people away for that reason, her friends needed to tell her that leaving him was still the right thing to do.
Tso could confide in Rieux because she was on the water, and she sat in front of him, not making eye contact. He was the gondolier she’d hired on a lark, in a town she was finished visiting. And because she was in the water, and the water knew everyone’s secrets. She stopped short of telling him about her mother and brother; she’d never even told the hospice patients about that. To give up her entire life story, she would need to be conversing with an ancient mariner.
Then she imagined Rieux plunging a needle into Markus and putting him out of her misery.
On the shore, a child in a face mask waved at her. Soon they were passing the houseboats. The woman they’d visited was on her deck, leaning against the rail. She called out something they couldn’t quite understand, something along the lines of, “I should have expected to see you.”
And yet Tso didn’t expect to see her. She was surprised to see a familiar face. Tso had been thinking about how unlikely it was that she was here, on the water. You think to yourself, who would ever do something like this? Then you think, what if I do this? Just to play a role. Then you’re passing by someone. And that person thinks, who would do something like this?
They were on the water for half an hour, tops, before Rieux needed to turn back. He admitted that paddleboarding was a test of his core strength. In the last stretch, Tso could feel the strain in his strokes. She wished she could take over.
“Shall we get back to our work?” he asked her. They had just stepped onto the dock. The water in False Creek had returned the softness to his face. The tone of his voice had changed. There had been only duty and determination in it two hours before, mustered with scalding tea on his tongue. Now he seemed to be speaking with the water under his feet. He asked his question as though it were the answer itself.
“Shall we get back to our work?” she asked back.
And so they did.
19.
Rieux was working at the auxiliary hospital when the announcement about the vaccine came. His job here was not only monotonous, but it forced him to see suffering as a collective process. He’d become accustomed to the old and weak dying, followed by healthy adults, and finally children with faces aged by pain. There were categories of patients, types of death. He needed to tell himself to speak to each one as though he would see them the next day. He administered the ineffective antibiotics as if he was pretending to be a child waving a magic wand.
Orla Castello asked him to be one of the doctors standing in the background on camera when she delivered the news about the vaccine. Rieux took his break early, disinfected himself, changed into his street clothes, and stepped outside. A communications officer from the Coastal Health Authority asked him to wear an ill-fitting set of scrubs.
“Thanks for being an extra in our production,” Castello told him. “I’m just the warm-up act. Our headliner is waiting in the wings. We need star power for this.”
A small crowd of news media had been assembled, though most of the news figures here looked at Castello skeptically. Not even Siddhu’s nerd-chic employer had bothered to bring his Polaroid camera. If the vaccine had been released a month earlier, there would have been spontaneous street parties. In that time, though, Castello had made announcements about positive but temporary shifts in infection and mortality rates. Her office had issued press releases that did nothing but reiterate the devotion of the city’s medical staff. Any residual excitement about the vaccine had been eaten away by timed leaks about its imminence.
As promised, Castello’s prepared statement about the vaccine was brief, with no time given for questions. She introduced another speaker to talk about the city’s plan to encourage vaccination.
It took Rieux a split second to recognize the mayor when he emerged from behind a door. There were gasps among the news media and some of the medical staff in their scrubs when Parsons made this first public appearance since the scandal, after his poorly received interview with Siddhu. Photos of Parsons had been posted on social media from time to time. He had grown a beard and started to wear a baseball cap. In some photos, he’d looked gaunt. Now, he looked like a close replica of the version of himself that had won the election.
According to Parsons, the vaccine would be freely distributed not only at hospitals, but also at community centres and libraries. Under Canadian law, immunization was not mandatory. An awareness campaign was being launched with print, internet, and billboard advertising. Door-to-door canvassing was an option still under consideration.
A question period followed. One reporter asked him whether he would go through with his anti-poverty measures. He said he would risk his remaining political capital on it. He refused to answer a single question about the scandal but shook his head briskly and said, “I’ve apologized to the city in a press release and to my family in private, but I’ll also do it now. I am sorry. The thing I’ve learned through my own personal downfall is how little it matters in a larger context. I hid in shame for the first months of this disease because of these reports. I should have snapped out of it earlier and helped. I should have used my power and privilege to help the people of Vancouver instead of wallowing in my own misery. Suffering is not equally distributed. Some people—namely, the oppressed—have suffered more than others. And I will fight for them. Next question.”
Castello leaned over to Rieux and spoke in a whisper. “It was his idea to do this press conference,” she said.
“The people who hate him will continue to feel that way,” Rieux said. “And the people who lost faith in him—do they care?”
“He wants to talk to you—about what, I can’t tell you. Do you have a minute?”
Rieux had to wait while Romeo Parsons offered his cheekbones for selfies. Even after his misconduct, he was still wanted in photos. The mayor noticed Rieux’s impatience and made his last photo quick. He then pulled the doctor aside and thanked him for his efforts with the Sanitation League. “I want to be a volunteer,” he told Rieux, then immediately added, “and this isn’t a publicity stunt.”
Rieux did not habitually turn away volunteers, but
he felt a strong urge to break from this practice now. “I want to like you,” he said. “And I didn’t vote for the other guy. I didn’t vote at all.” Parsons began to speak, but Rieux held up his hand. “This is not about your personal business,” the doctor told him. “It’s because I don’t think your idea of suffering is grounded in reality.” Rieux added that he believed the mayor’s intentions were good but that his remarks betrayed an intellectual superficiality. “It’s hard for me to explain,” he said. “Let me show you.”
Before he took Parsons into the ward, they had to change into hazmat suits. Parsons stepped into the gear tentatively. He seemed more worried about leaving his handmade Italian shoes in the change area than what he would see next.
Rieux could only admit afterward to his cruelty. He had taken a dislike to Parsons after the speech he gave following the riots. To Rieux, his remarks had been divisive. By claiming that the disease had somehow enacted karmic payback on the rich, he was saying that some people deserved to die. By contrast, the mayor’s own downfall, the consequence of a poor personal decision, he’d attributed to a rare psychological phenomenon, which allowed him to sidestep blame.
The mayor, Rieux believed, had also invoked the history of smallpox in the region gratuitously. He had invoked au courant ideology to explain an unprecedented event because he wanted to blame the affluent ones for their disease instead of considering its randomness. (The authors of this chronicle do not necessarily agree with Rieux’s interpretation of the mayor’s intent.) The doctor had somewhat blunted himself from feeling, but he knew about the types of suffering that hobbled bystanders. And he felt a pain dig into his own side whenever he stopped working; it opened its mouth and spat misery. He knew what he was doing to Parsons.
Rieux led the mayor down a corridor of partitions. The ward resembled a tent city—or a peculiar art class. Each partition contained another student artist’s slightly different take on the same scene.
