The Plague

by Kevin Chong

  He hated killing time, but he ended up at Guildford Town Centre Mall in Surrey. In the mall, he bought some Duplo blocks and Play-Doh for the boys. He looked at his watch and decided he had enough time to buy himself two new shirts. He had lost weight in quarantine, despite eating at greasy restaurants once or twice a day. It must have been all the walking.

  He checked his phone again. The article still hadn’t appeared.

  He checked his phone again.

  He checked his phone again.

  He checked his phone again.

  He checked his phone again.

  He checked his phone again. This time the website was down.

  Then came a text from Uma. “Read this,” she wrote. She’d included a link.

  It was from his old newspaper. An image of Horne-Bough loaded onto the screen, a photo taken a few years ago. Horne-Bough was wearing a fedora and an eyebrow ring. The headline loaded afterward: “Media Entrepreneur Charged with Hacking.” The breaking news item was brief. More details were to follow.

  An anonymous tip and a cache of information led the RCMP to the arrest. Mostly, staffers within City Hall had been hacked. The mayor’s private email address as well as his web-search history had been hacked. Siddhu figured the whistleblower was one of the disgruntled GSSP staffers who’d left in December. It made so much sense to him now. His own email had probably been compromised. Hadn’t Horne-Bough anticipated his needs well?

  Siddhu felt his anticipation dissipate. He was on a hot air balloon that began drifting back to the ground soon after its ascent.

  “I guess my story has nowhere to go,” he wrote to Uma. “I’m coming home.”

  But all he wanted to do was keep walking around the mall. He had no reason to hurry. And the world had opened its door to him once more.

  21.

  In the third week of January, as Megan Tso and Jeffrey Oishi were finishing a shift with the Sanitation League, she saw her face on a telephone pole in Strathcona; an image from a vacation she’d taken three years earlier in Berlin, standing against a spray-painted section of its Wall, was placed on a poster under the words, “MISSING SINCE SEPTEMBER 24TH.” It listed her full name, age, height, and weight, and a description of the butterfly tattooed on her ankle. An email address and a cellphone number were given at the bottom of the poster.

  Was that why she had gotten those funny looks in the last few days? Were people inspecting her? She tore the poster from the telephone pole and climbed into Oishi’s Audi. As the judge drove, she noticed another poster a block up on Princess Avenue. “Stop the car,” she said. The car caught black ice and slid along the street before coming to a halt.

  “What is it?” Oishi asked.

  “The hell I escaped.”

  They had spent the morning and afternoon taking seniors to get vaccinated. This was his third day riding along with her and he’d held up well. The judge was on leave from work, and his hands shook periodically, but he insisted that this was better than sitting in his hotel room with a bottle of rye and his daughter’s stuffed Arctic seal, scrolling through his iPhone photo album. He was helping people who had gone through this. It made him feel less alone.

  Within an hour, both Grossman and Rieux texted her images of the poster in separate neighbourhoods. Each of them told her to call the police. She knew they could do nothing. She had grown accustomed to Markus’s unyielding insistence on her life.

  As a criminal judge, Oishi was aware of the extent that the law protected Markus more than it did her. He suggested that she get a black-market taser.

  “Did you dump him because he was possessive?” he asked.

  “He dumped me,” Tso said. “He hated how messy I was. But then I moved on with my life. He no longer had me to blame for his own failures. So he insisted on harassing me.”

  “What’s his end goal?”

  “I don’t think it’s to get back together with me. His end goal is just to make me miserable.”

  Oishi looked out the passenger window and pointed to one more poster. Tso told him to continue driving. “I wish my wife and I hated each other less. We have so many other things in common,” he said.

  The other night, he’d tried to kiss her in the restaurant lounge. He wasn’t her type, but she let him kiss her long enough to entertain but reject the idea of doing more. She missed physical contact. Her body felt like a callous, and she wanted to be touched to regain sensitivity to the world. She imagined herself with Oishi and how it would be afterward, and she could only picture the kind of mutual regret that made former lovers hide behind trees to avoid each other. He knew that, too. When she told him it wouldn’t be a good idea, his apology followed a hot sigh of relief.

  They met Grossman at her apartment. Outside, on the sidewalk, she’d placed a sandwich board. In chalk she had written: “Izzy’s Storytelling Night: Come Laugh & Cry at the Plague.” Grossman had cooked a roast with Yorkshire pudding before the performance at her club, and the smell of the meat rendered Tso wobbly with hunger. And Grossman was making real gravy.

  Afterward, they helped her get ready for the event. Grossman had reimagined the ground-floor studio as a performance space that she named “Izzy’s” after her father. She had commissioned a neon-style LED sign with the name and an illustration of her father’s face—younger, eyes a-twinkle in a way that Tso never saw firsthand—that hung outside the front door. Inside was a small stage. A vintage bar had been installed.

  It took Tso a moment to notice the bare walls. “What did you do with all of Janet’s paintings?” she asked Grossman. “Did you return them to her?”

  “Sort of,” Grossman said. “Janet believed that I was in wrongful possession of her creative work. She was right. But those paintings all featured my image. At no time did she ask me whether I wanted to be in her paintings. So I returned them to her with my likeness cut out with an X-Acto knife. I’d always felt invisible in our relationship and even when Janet painted me, she painted me the way she wanted other people to see me. The holes I made in her work make it more honest.” She filled Tso and Oishi’s respective wine glasses before filling her own. “What do you think? Does that sound psycho?”

  Tso removed the torn poster from the back pocket of her jeans and held it up. “You’ll have to up your game.”

  Grossman nodded at the poster. “Why don’t we get Khan to take care of that nuisance?” she asked.

  Oishi looked puzzled. Tso quickly explained the situation with Grossman’s tenant and his role as a fixer and procurer. They had called on him recently to acquire additional vaccine, and it came through the next day.

  “What could Khan do?” Tso replied. “Send him off on the garbage barge? He’d only end up back here.”

  Grossman stared up at the ceiling. “He could do other things.” When Tso didn’t respond to the insinuation, she added: “I bet Khan could find someone burly and unscrupulous to take care of your ex.”

  “I already caught your hint.”

  They took their places as the event’s start time approached. Oishi stood at the door, taking the cover charge. Fifty folding chairs had been rented for the event, which had only been advertised on social media and in a few local culture blogs. In the first ten minutes after the doors opened only two people had come. Grossman and her friends waited nervously as show time approached. Just before eight o’clock, people came in a cluster, and a line formed outside as Oishi fumbled with change. Grossman poured her guests plastic glasses of red and white wine and offered premixed highballs from cups. A few of the attendees recognized Tso, who worried they had seen her ex’s poster, but they had met her at the after party that followed her book event in October. They thought she’d made it out of the city. Tso’s memory of her first days here felt like keepsakes from another era and world. But only three months had passed since she’d first come to this big house.

  The start time needed to be pushed back. Every chair was occupied and they scrambled to find more. People had come out of curiosity. They saw friends
they hadn’t spoken to since autumn. The room, initially draughty, was warm with body heat and the air electrified with the smell of booze. Grossman was starting to grow out of her tinted grey hair, and its black roots were showing. She had changed out of her apron and old jeans into a black tuxedo shirt and jacket over hot pants and fishnets. It was the first time Tso had seen her friend looking so femme. She resembled the photos Tso had seen of Grossman’s mother, the dancer. And then she understood her friend’s look to be a salute to both her parents.

  As Grossman took the stage, Tso remembered how jittery she’d behaved at the book event and then her pudding-smooth delivery on the tour bus. Her preamble before introducing the first speaker in her roster of storytellers—friends, social-media acquaintances, volunteers for the Sanitation League—was delivered in a confident but off-the-cuff manner.

  “This space was created by a cataclysm,” she said shortly after giving the land acknowledgment. “Everyone here has seen a friend or family member or co-worker fall ill. Some of us have lost our livelihoods. Some of us no longer have reasons to get out of bed. When this crisis is done, the city will hire a world-famous artist to build a monument to those who perished. It’ll be fucking beautiful. And I will drive my tour bus around it and talk about how difficult this period was. But who will pay tribute to the rest of us who lived and are still searching for new reasons to get out of bed? Only we can do it. We pay tribute to each other. Tonight, I pay tribute to you.”

  The speakers varied in quality. Some spoke with notes and stumbled over their own sentences. Others came off as too polished. One speaker, a professional comedian, made light of his maniacal devotion toward cleanliness that led him to develop a crack addiction to offset the stress. Another storyteller, a florist by trade, spoke of giving birth alone, right after her husband had been hospitalized with the disease. He had been one of the lucky ones, but both she and her partner had felt alone during their respective hospitalizations. As the night continued, Tso realized how far off she had been about Grossman. When they first met, Grossman seemed to her like a professional devotee. She let others take advantage of her to blot out her own thwarted ambitions. But bringing people together—Rieux had incorrectly ascribed this ability to Tso—was her genius. She magnified the talents of others. She (literally) gave them the stage on which they could shine.

  Tso and Oishi allowed their friend to play host as they stacked the chairs and collected empty plastic wine glasses. Tso watched the judge throughout the performance. For the first half of the show, he reacted to every comment or laugh line a beat too late. Then he seemed in sync with the rest of the audience. Near the end, he filled his plastic cup to the brim with wine and leaned against the wall.

  They finished cleaning and headed to the after-party upstairs. On their way up, they saw Farhad Khan. The smuggler rarely stayed in his apartment, only returning to change his clothes or to move boxes in and out with his associates. He stood at the top of the stairs, ready to fist bump Tso.

  His eyes stopped smiling first. When they reached the top landing, he hung his head down, nodded hello, and then dashed down the stairs.

  Before Tso could wonder aloud about Khan’s peculiar behaviour, Oishi told them that they knew each other. “I thought his name sounded familiar,” he said.

  Oishi explained that he had met Khan during a trial. Khan had had run-ins with the law since he was a teenager and served time in youth detention centres for drug offences and stolen property. When he came into Oishi’s courtroom, he was charged with possession for the purpose of trafficking over half a million dollars of cocaine. Crown prosecutors offered him a lower sentence—one that meant he was out the door with time served—in exchange for testimony that led to the arrest of his boss.

  “We’re not talking about high-level gang leaders, but a bunch of kids who were in over their heads,” Oishi explained. “If this boss was a pro, Khan would have been dead years ago. There’d be bullet holes in his windshield, and no one would care—because he deserved it.” Instead, a young wannabe was given the task of killing him soon after his release. He was supposed to be at a party. “This so-called hitman shot someone who happened to be wearing the same shoes,” he said. “What a waste. He was innocent. He was someone’s kid.”

  Tso didn’t spend much time at Grossman’s after-party. There were too many sad stories swirling in her head. She returned to Izzy Grossman’s apartment and tried to fall asleep on the couch.

  In her book she’d written about the need to ascribe meaning to death. She had come to the conclusion that only heroic firefighters and villainous terrorists authored their own meaningful demises. For everyone else, a full, well-lived life could be undermined by a painful or abrupt exit. Survivors scrambled to give meaning in these moments. They would say that someone who died after a long struggle with terminal cancer used their end of life to demonstrate grace and courage. If a ninety-year-old man died while rock-climbing, loved ones could speak about his passion for the sport. But in the past three months, Vancouverites had faced deaths that resisted meaning. People died prematurely, painfully, and for no reason. At least this suffering happened collectively, and survivors could take comfort in one another. But even in this ocean of collective anguish, there were people who felt lonely in their pain.

  Megan was woken early the next day by two police officers. She was asked to identify the body of a man who was killed the previous night in a traffic accident on Denman Street. The victim was described as a Caucasian male in his late twenties or early thirties with light brown hair and blue eyes and a “trumpet-like symbol” tattooed on his right bicep—Markus was a Thomas Pynchon fan. He died without identification. Among his possessions was an address book with her name and the hotel that she had checked out of weeks earlier. The front-desk clerk at the hotel who knew that Tso had often shared meals with Oishi called the judge in his room. She didn’t hear the voicemail that Oishi had left for her until she grabbed her phone on the way out the door.

  “Did he run into traffic?” Tso asked the police officer. She had never taken Markus’s talk of suicide seriously. It felt like a scare tactic.

  “I don’t know the details,” the officer replied. “But there were witnesses at the intersection. And the death is being treated as accidental.”

  Tso wanted time to clear her head. The police officers insisted on driving her to the morgue at Vancouver General Hospital. She threw on her coat over her pyjamas and stepped into the back of the police cruiser. The morgue, one officer explained, was functioning at full capacity, so the city was doing its best to dispatch bodies.

  The night before, she had dreamed that she’d seen Markus on the street and run after him on the icy sidewalks near the hotel. The faster she ran after him, calling out his name, the more desperate he seemed to evade her. The dream ended with the policeman’s knock on the door. If it hadn’t, would she have chased him blindly into traffic?

  At the morgue, she was taken to a room decked out with Haida art and boxes of Kleenex on a coffee table. A grief counsellor entered the room and explained that Tso would not need to see the body herself. “This isn’t like TV shows,” she explained. She held a clipboard with a picture of the deceased and placed the picture on the table face down. Tso turned the picture over immediately and saw that half of his face was swollen and bloodied. The other half—the right side—was the one she had seen for the better part of two years, snoring peacefully, when she woke first.

  “Do you recognize this face?” the grief counsellor asked.

  “I do,” she told her. “We lived together in California. We were engaged. He was used to driving. He was a lousy pedestrian. Like me.”

  How did this happen? He had spent so much time torturing her. Just yesterday he was postering the city in search of her. And then he was gone—like that. Suddenly, ambiguously, randomly. She was released from him. She didn’t know whether she now felt broken or had already been broken. She had broken herself to keep from being irreparably destroyed.


  She last saw Markus alive at a reading in West Hollywood, a year earlier. He interrupted the event with his accusations and she had to stop making public appearances in Los Angeles for that reason. Still he had no trouble finding her; they had friends in common. Tso didn’t move out of the city. He would find out where she lived but stop short of confronting her.

  He preferred to leave reminders instead. This was his final reminder.

  And this was how Tso overlaid meaning onto a traffic-accident casualty amid a pandemic.

  22.

  When Romeo Parsons joined the Sanitation League, three of its volunteers had already contracted the illness. One died as a result. Parsons was well aware of the risks involved. But when he started to exhibit symptoms in February, he didn’t believe that he was ill. He had taken the vaccine, which had been remarkably effective. The drop in new infections and fatalities in the last week dispelled any notions that the disease was merely having an “off” week. The disease had finally been throttled. Knowing that, Parsons didn’t feel he could have contracted anything worse than a cold. He continued his work as usual.

  Parsons put in tireless shifts for the Sanitation League. He mopped vomit from the floors of infected homes. He rocked to sleep a colicky infant whose mother was ill. He did his work as quietly as possible. He kept his face mask on and wore contact lenses instead of his signature glasses. When he was recognized, he posed in selfies and offered hugs to those who wanted them—they often did. Many of these admirers wanted to absolve Parsons of his transgressions. You’re a good person. It wasn’t your fault. You had a sickness. It wasn’t your fault like it wasn’t my fault I got bitten by a diseased flea.

  “It was a set-up,” one woman said, after insisting to Parsons and Rieux that they eat her cookies. She had lost her husband right before the New Year and needed help donating his clothes to the Salvation Army. “Your enemies put her up to it.”