by Kevin Chong
Tucked away in one room were ten hospital beds set aside for infected children. There was extra room for parents. Some slept on mats beside their child’s bed. Rieux and Parsons reached the bed of a four-year-old girl. Her parents sat slumped over in chairs on opposite sides of the bed. The mother slept soundly. The father, who looked like he was tasting something bitter as he slept, briefly stirred and opened his eyes at the sound of his child’s whimpering. He closed them again.
“She was brought in twenty-four hours ago by her mother,” Rieux said quietly. “Her father came in shortly afterward. She has not responded to treatment.”
The doctor pulled over an empty chair from another partition. “If you want to understand what’s going on in this city that you lead, I want you to stay in this seat until it’s over,” he instructed the mayor. “If you still think you want to volunteer after this, then we will be pleased to take you on.” Rieux did not tell Parsons that he was the only volunteer who had to undergo this test.
The doctor had witnessed the deaths of children since he began work in the auxiliary hospital. He mentioned this facet of his job only once to his friends, saying it was the most difficult part. But Rieux minimized his own distress by de-particularizing those deaths, slotting them into a category—“the worst ones,” the patients who were the most “emotionally taxing.” He used those words as stoppers for his bottled emotions.
Last year, he’d reread parts of The Brothers Karamazov. He didn’t have the energy to go through the whole book, which he’d first consumed one vacant winter as an undergrad. Now he summoned his own memory of the Grand Inquisitor section, just before Ivan’s allegorical tale in conversation with his sensitive brother Alyosha. Ivan insisted something to the effect that he could not accept the harmony of God and the universe if it included the torture of children. What remained in Rieux’s mind was that he did not go so far as to deny God by insisting on disharmony. Rieux himself didn’t want to accept pointlessness—and the ensuing pursuit of gratified appetites—because of a child’s pain.
The authors of this piece (who shall be revealed soon) have, up until now, refrained from describing the deaths of children. They were not consequential to the stories of the figures we’ve followed. We are aware that the suffering of children can be acutely difficult and may prompt, among readers of this history, their own troubling memories. For some parents it might incite a painful consideration of their own worst fears.
We feel that the following episode merited inclusion. We are aware that the suffering can’t be entirely glossed over. We agonized over how best to describe this material. One of the authors suggested leaving a blank page in place of an account, which another dismissed as a “trite gimmick.” We decided, in the end, to neither dwell on nor gloss over this child’s death.
We therefore kindly invite those who might feel most sensitively about this material to either skip the remainder of this chapter or read it at arm’s length.
The mayor agreed not to leave his place at the foot of the girl’s bed until she died. He made a call to his assistant to clear his schedule and then turned off his phone.
The little girl had roused herself awake. Her arms were folded across her chest, one hand over a fist. She started shaking wildly. Rieux held the child down by the arms while he hushed her. He and Parsons heard a clunk as something rolled onto the floor. Parsons reached down and picked up a metal yo-yo. He rolled the thread back into the axle.
First the father, then the mother stood as the child continued to convulse. They were surprised to see Parsons with them but accepted his explanation. He realized that the mother and father were on opposite sides of the bed intentionally. Neither of them spoke to Rieux. When he’d offered his prognosis, they looked at him as if they’d been slapped.
The child did not seem calmed by the presence of her parents. She did not seem aware of them. Her eyes did figure eights in the chalky light. Then she shut her eyes, relaxed her arms, and fell into an agitated half-sleep. Her jaw remained clenched, and she periodically grimaced.
Both of Rose’s parents understood that their child was gravely ill, that she was likely to perish. They had fallen into a trance of pre-mourning and panic—a state that many Vancouverites experienced in those days. The child’s calmer state briefly snapped them out of that condition.
“What have you been doing for the last couple of months?” the mother, Lisa Randall-Oishi, asked Parsons during one of these lulls.
“I was still working but not in public,” he said. “There was personal stuff too. I had to move.”
“Are you in a hotel?” Jeffrey Oishi asked.
“The townhouse version of a sad bachelor apartment,” he said. “The assistant city manager loaned it to me. She’s living with her boyfriend. It forced him to commit”
This was perhaps the only moment of levity that day.
Rieux left Parsons for a couple of hours as he attended to other patients. When he returned, Parsons was alone with the child, holding her hand as she tossed her head from side to side on the pillow. Her parents had gone for dinner during a lull, but a new wave of fever was striking her. Her mouth opened as though she wanted to swallow something in front of her. Then it moved as though she wanted to speak, but no sound came. She gritted her teeth again and her body stiffened. She threw her arms and legs out like she was fighting a phantom.
The mayor looked to Rieux in disbelief. It was not only hard to watch—it was too much to watch. This girl’s frantic movements and voiceless moans did not correspond with his expectations of death, even a painful hospital death.
The wave of fever subsided, and the child rolled to one side of the bed. She clutched her yo-yo and a stuffed Arctic seal. She pushed away her blanket. Parsons pulled it back, and the smell of her sticky sweat filled their noses.
Rieux knew the wait wouldn’t be much longer. He left to eat a muffin. When he returned, Rose Oishi’s bed was surrounded. Her parents had rejoined Parsons, and Dr Orla Castello was now there too. Rieux did not want to think poorly of her presence around grieving parents. She could empathize with them, but there was also a part of her that eagerly greeted newly bereaved parents to her own state of brokenness. She would talk them through the first few moments so she could relive them herself.
Elyse sometimes accused him of being cynical, and this was another moment when he wished she was wrong. And yet, he was not self-aware enough to understand that his own motivations with Parsons—to prove him wrong in the most devastating fashion possible—were the same.
He looked at Castello and saw that the time was approaching. Rose struggled under her covers again, then tossed them away from her. She turned over and drew her knees to her face in a fetal position. She raised her head, her neck stretched, and started to move her eyes. New tears had filled them. Suddenly, she screamed.
The parents said something to Rieux, but he couldn’t remember what they said or what he said back. They moved around pointlessly, taking turns sobbing on one another. A nurse came into the room and they calmed themselves again.
Rose Oishi was quiet through most of the evening. Throughout this time, there had been a din of groaning and sobbing from other rooms that regular visitors had to ignore. Rose Oishi’s scream was clear as glass and had the effect of dishes crashing onto the floor of a busy restaurant and silencing the room.
When she finished screaming, she turned onto her back. It was now a little past one in the morning. Her eyes sharpened into focus and she looked at her mother and father for a handful of hollow breaths. Her fingers clutched the railing of the bed before they slipped. She arched her back, then slumped onto the bed.
It seemed like everyone around that bed and in that room had waited for her scream to end. The din in the room returned. The parents, who had braced themselves against her bed, commenced their wailing. Castello poised herself to console them.
Rieux watched Romeo Parsons, who looked up into the fluorescent lights and then back at the body of the newly deceased chil
d. He was like Leontius in Plato’s Republic, who could not resist the urge to gape at recently executed bodies by a wall. “There, ye wretches,” he says, addressing his own two eyes, “take your fill of the fine spectacle!” Each time Parsons’ eyes returned to the dead girl, the more they dimmed. Rieux did not need to tell him that this child was not responsible for her own death.
The doctor realized what it meant to have never had children. He had wanted them with Elyse and knew they would consume his life. But the love parents had for their defenceless children was still an abstraction for him. Parsons, by contrast, had children. Rieux already knew that. But he would have known just by looking at Parsons’ face then.
The mayor turned to Rieux and spoke in a froggy voice. “I’ve passed your test,” he said. “Let me know when the first shift begins.”
Part Four
20.
The vaccine was introduced to the public through a stubbornly icy last half of January. It was heralded by health officials as a turning point, and in the end statistical evidence would support the claim. In the meantime, confusion ensued after its release. Death counts spiked in that period. Half the citizens thought the inoculation wouldn’t work. They believed it would hasten their deaths or that it was a part of one of many conspiracies. The other half of the population, who submitted to vaccination, viewed it as the end of their troubles. They found themselves in four-hour lineups and got visibly upset when clinics began their days without supplies.
Raymond Siddhu watched these developments from home in his pilled bathrobe. He subscribed to his old newspaper and tried not to read their articles like a former employee or a competitor would. Opening the door each morning to get the paper from his front step was his only exposure to the world outside his house in the three weeks since he’d returned home.
He had become, as he feared, a stranger to his own sons. When they were reunited at last, Ranjeet bawled at the sight of him and Ravinder did not make eye contact. When Uma went out to the gym or the mall, he watched the boys until they were tired of being watched. He’d turn his back to get more blueberries from the refrigerator and they would burble back to life. He wished he hadn’t given his yo-yo away.
Siddhu traded bowls of ice cream for smiles and hugs. He let them watch TV beyond the rationed time allowed by Uma and stood in front of it until they spoke to him. By the end of the third day, they responded to him, shrieking and tumbling into his arms. They wrestled on the couch after he delayed bedtime.
“It’s harder with the kids now that you’re back,” Uma fumed. “We had a structure.”
While the boys napped, he laboured slowly on his escape story for GSSP. Horne-Bough wanted it badly and sent Siddhu texts twice a day to inquire about its progress. “Our readers want this,” he said. “You swam in garbage, you wrestled with rats, then you busted out of the city. You’re a fucking hero.” Siddhu felt an obligation to finish the story but worried about the scrutiny his illegal act would invite.
“Once you publish that story, the cops will come for you and take you right back to the city gates,” Uma said. “Are you sick of us already?” She had been jittery since his return. She wanted him to fix the running toilet and screamed at him when he couldn’t leave the house to buy the parts. Then she tearfully stroked his arm. “Why have you become so cold?” she asked. She had become so hot.
He hadn’t gotten used to sleeping on only half the bed again. He lay there, coiled, worried he’d spring if he dropped his guard. His body may have left the barricades, but his mind had not escaped. He did not, of course, want to return. And yet, he’d not been ready to leave.
One night, he attempted to have a video chat with Megan Tso. She didn’t accept his call. When she called back, he was already in bed. Uma was drifting off and was startled by the incoming call. He took his tablet into the kitchen.
“Is it too late?” Tso asked from Janice Grossman’s apartment. She was drinking wine and eating Triscuits with slivers of apple and cheese.
“A little,” Siddhu admitted. “But I’m glad you called. Still hiding out, I see. What’s the latest on your stalker?”
“You don’t want to know,” she told him. Her expression was more resigned than fearful. “Let’s just say he’s still looking for me.”
He heard someone say from offscreen, “Is that Rrrrrrrrrrraymundo?” Tso nodded. Grossman appeared onscreen in pyjama pants and a tank top. On one of her bare arms she wore a bandage. She had been vaccinated. “We miss you, buddy. And not just because you had the best yo-yo tricks. The quality of news coverage has dropped. Where am I going to learn the truth about City Hall?”
“We could ask the mayor himself,” Tso suggested. “We just spent eight hours with him, scrubbing bathrooms and driving old people to clinics.”
Siddhu pinched the bridge of his nose. He felt an acute nostalgia for the drudgery of the Sanitation League. “I feel like I’m in two places,” he confessed. “The whole time I was in that hotel room by myself, I’d fantasize about being beamed home, like on Star Trek. Now I’m home, but it doesn’t feel right. It’s like I’m still being beamed back, like I’m transparent and there’s sparkly light coursing through my body, and I’m not quite here yet. Does that make sense?”
“Star Trek is with the Vulcans, right?”
He could normally tell when she was being sarcastic. This time he wasn’t so sure. “Yeah, it was set in the twenty-third century, when humankind had to leave earth to find problems,” he said. “Am I crazy for missing my old life? This whole thing has been terrible, but I felt like I was in a community for the first time.”
“It’s true. I’ve seen people risk their lives for strangers, people who would otherwise be unheroic. Being at home surrounded by family, in safety, must be a comedown.”
He knew that was sarcasm.
They chatted about Judge Oishi and Tso told Siddhu about his daughter. Siddhu asked her about Rieux, but she only mentioned that he looked tired. Then she yawned and said good night.
He returned to bed. Uma was now awake, lying on her side, scrolling through her social media feed on her phone. Her face was pinched. “Sorry,” he told her. “It was a call from a friend.”
“Is that why you’ve been so off?” Uma asked. “I have noticed.”
Siddhu wanted to say the same to her, but he started to weep. Uma wrapped her arms around his shoulders and held him for the first time since the night of his return. He felt her own tears on his arm.
“I need to tell you something,” Uma admitted after he had quieted. “I’ve been seeing someone.”
They both remained still long enough to notice each other’s wet breathing.
“How did you find the time?” he finally asked her.
She sat up on the bed. “Is that really what you want to know?”
“Are you still having an affair?” he asked.
“Yes. But it’s not anyone you know. We met online.”
“Are you in love with him?”
“I don’t know where it’s going. I thought you wouldn’t be back for a while. And then, there you were in the shower one night.”
“Do you still love me?”
She hesitated. “Yes.”
He felt a warmth pooling from separate directions, the sadness in his head and the despair in his body.
They agreed to talk about it the next day, and Uma started to snore within five minutes. Siddhu found himself braced against his edge of the bed. He got up and made the pullout in the spare room, then fell into the middle of the thin mattress like a skydiver and plummeted from the waking world.
In the morning, he heard Uma feeding the kids. Their laughter was brighter around their mother. It was laughter that hadn’t been coaxed.
Siddhu changed in the master bedroom. This was the day Uma’s mother came over from the other side of the duplex to watch the kids. Sometimes she took them to the park so Uma could nap or read a book. Probably Uma used that time to meet her lover. The thought of it made him sob as he ran a t
oothbrush across his teeth. He took his laptop and grabbed the car keys from the table by the stairs.
At the McDonald’s drive-through he ordered an Egg McMuffin and coffee. He turned off the engine in the parking lot, opened his laptop, and reviewed the latest draft of his story. Once he completed his read-through, he sent it to Horne-Bough along with edited video clips from his hidden camera. He felt the satisfaction, the dread, the relief, of doing something he couldn’t take back. Horne-Bough instantly replied that he would release it in an hour. “This is the story I’ve been waiting for—and you did it all on your own,” he wrote. “Prepare to have your name on the tip of everyone’s tongue.”
Earlier in his life, this would have been a dream realized. Now he dreaded the idea. He did not want his phone to light up. He had seen what happened to Romeo Parsons. The mayor had fallen more quickly than he had risen. Siddhu wanted his daily bread, his daily practice. He wanted all the time available to watch his boys grow up.
He drove to the hardware store and bought a new flapper for the toilet. In the hardware store parking lot, he sent a text to Uma to tell her where he’d gone. “I hope you didn’t need the car,” he wrote. He sent another text to say his story would be posted.
How did they drive into this ditch in their relationship? Uma had attended the same high-school as Siddhu, two grades below him. Her older brother played basketball with him. As a teenager, Siddhu spent an evening on a couch with her watching a Batman movie. He had forgotten about that night until she mentioned it to him seven years later when they found themselves seated next to each other in a banquette of a lounge bar. They were at the birthday party of a mutual friend and he’d had to work to make her laugh. He used to be popular with women, now he couldn’t remember how.
He couldn’t imagine dating again at his age. He felt like a blob.
He checked his phone. Uma wanted to know if he was doing okay. His article still had not appeared. No one would come for him in a patrol car, not yet.
