The Plague Read online

  Siddhu preferred to take public transportation into the city, departing before rush hour began. In such fashion, he could leave the car for his wife, Uma, who had another two months of maternity leave, and be out of the house before his twin boys, Ranjeet and Ravinder, woke each other up. This morning, Uma was still sleeping; she’d stayed up late, sewing together Halloween outfits for their ten-month-old babies. In Siddhu’s mind, they already attracted too much attention, but his opinion, he was beginning to discover, counted for nothing. The boys would go trick-or-treating as salt-and-pepper shakers.

  In the winter, taking the bus entailed stepping outside when the sky was still cobalt blue. The bus—and later, the SkyTrain—meant fifty-five minutes of enforced inactivity. Reading or checking email on his phone while in a moving vehicle turned his stomach. Eating or drinking was prohibited. Occasionally he would listen to streaming music or a podcast, but finding new music and podcasts was a part-time job in itself. The calm of the bus ride allowed him to rest before he launched into a work day that often left him both exhausted and buzzing. His job had always involved deadlines and compromises, but the latest round of buyouts and cuts at the newspaper induced stress hives. He’d already covered the health and city hall beats; the September workforce reduction brought op-eds into his portfolio. At least he now had a window-facing cubicle. And at the morning story meeting, he could find blueberry muffins. A perk, right? The fruit-stained fingertips of a laid-off staffer flashed before his eyes.

  The newsroom meeting was brisk and uneventful as the editor-in-chief’s rundown of top stories went unquestioned. Siddhu was asked to discuss his story about a clinic on the edge of an area contentiously known as the Gastown Annex; the doctors there had put a priority on treating patients who’d been displaced by the development. Siddhu got the sense that he was going on too long. Everyone seemed impatient for the day to proceed. Among a boardroom full of people who prided themselves in declaring every bit of news a poor copy of something that happened ten years earlier, there was an anxious energy surrounding an afternoon visit by Romeo Parsons.

  The newly elected mayor had the heady glamour of a movie star, despite his near-sightedness and fluency in rezoning policy. The staff at Siddhu’s workplace prized neutrality, but the swooning could not be concealed when his name was uttered in passing. Newspaper sales, stagnant though they were, rose to 2007 levels whenever his face appeared on its front page. Siddhu did not trust Parsons but would never have voiced his skepticism. It would have been a singular shame in the office to have admitted voting for the incumbent. Luckily, he lived outside city limits.

  At his new desk, he reviewed a press release from the clinic, which had introduced an outreach worker to find patients pushed out by the Annex. The phone started to ring. He initially ignored it, thinking the call was for the desk’s previous occupant, who was currently in a guest house in Mexico on an indefinite vacation. He checked the caller ID and recognized the name: Elliot Horne-Bough, the young owner of a popular news website, GSSP. The site had repurposed a few of his buzziest stories, leaving out his byline, to whip up their own internet traffic.

  Horne-Bough told Siddhu that he wanted to meet with him, which Siddhu interpreted as a peace offering. He declined.

  “How about instead of an apology, I hire you?” Horne-Bough said. “Sorries are for suckers.”

  “I already have a job. And I need to go.”

  “Okay, but I am persistent. I don’t want you to work for me. I want you as a partner. Remember that: I am persistent.” Siddhu hung up.

  As the afternoon approached, LED camera lights were installed in the front foyer for photos with the new mayor. Women came back from lunch wearing more makeup, and men who lived in wrinkly button-downs had covered them with blazers. Siddhu kept a bottle of mouthwash in his drawer and wondered whether he should pass it around before he took the elevator downstairs.

  Outside it was spitting rain. A handful of blocks separated his office in the city’s financial centre from the Annex. He sidestepped the tourist shops in Gastown selling replica totem poles and Canadian flags and barrelled along the Annex’s cobblestoned pedestrian thoroughfare. Siddhu’s last meal out with Uma had been in the summer at one of the new sidewalk cafés. Coloured lights had been strung between the four-storey buildings over the thoroughfare, and he felt like he was in Europe. Now he missed the balmy weather if not the solicitous gastropub owners and sushi slingers hoping to entice him onto their patios.

  The clinic sat at the end of the development, around suspiciously charred buildings that were now weeks away from demolition. He stepped foot inside the waiting area to sounds of coughing and told the receptionist about his appointment. “Our new counsellor called in sick—at the last minute,” she told him, too harried to be apologetic. “Dr Rieux has offered to speak to you.”

  Siddhu agreed, knowing it was his best chance to avoid Romeo Parsons, and was sent back to the waiting area. None of the magazines on the table had been published within the past three years. Most of the waiting patients wore headphones and sat slumped on their chairs. One woman held a child on her knee. She was trying to comfort the boy who was no older than six years old, and held his own elbows as though he ached everywhere else. The mother seemed to think the child needed to be cajoled out of his pain, her admonishments delivered in singsong syllables. The boy grimaced but held back his tears.

  Since Siddhu had become a father, he’d lost the ability to throttle his emotions. Once he could clench his mouth into a mask of calm; now the feelings bubbled onto his face. Siddhu knew that when his eyes began to water, soon he would be bawling. Just a month earlier, both of his babies had gone into anaphylactic shock after they’d first tried eggs. He remembered the step-by-step hurry of bundling the boys and latching them into their car seats, and his wife snarling at him because a strap was twisted. He remembered driving to the hospital in pyjamas, the headwind of paperwork at admissions, and then the wait.

  Siddhu felt the yo-yo in his pocket. When the boy’s glance landed in his direction, he flashed the silver Ricochet in his closed palm and slung it out. Then he stood up, threw the yo-yo behind him, and brought it up so it looked like he was walking a dog. He’d been given a yo-yo as a child but had only renewed his fascination in the last six months. The yo-yo he owned was an indulgence and aspirational purchase; it was made for professionals and produced a pleasant ratcheting sound as it unwound. He brought the toy up to his chest, flung it down, and separated his hands to recreate the trick he’d seen online. The boy’s expression settled, and his mother quit chirping and smoothed the hair on the back of his head.

  Dr Rieux appeared. He was a short man who wore his hair in a bouquet of wiry brown curls. He had a Mediterranean complexion but his eyes seemed to have some East Asian provenance. When he saw Siddhu’s tears, he instinctively shrank back. Siddhu snapped the yo-yo back into his hand.

  “I’m about to take a coffee break,” the doctor told him. “Do you want to come with me?”

  Everyone in the crowded waiting room watched him bounce out. The doctor was indifferent to their looks of impatience and disappointment. Rieux was arrogant—like many doctors Siddhu had met. “It’s been crazy all week. There’s a flu in the neighbourhood,” the doctor told him. At the corner coffee shop—a place Siddhu would later describe as a “Scandinavian coffee laboratory”—Rieux told him to order a twelve-ounce latte. Siddhu followed his command, even though he usually took his coffee black, then Rieux led them to a set of stools by the window.

  “Do you want to start your tape recorder?” Rieux asked.

  The coffee had an unctuous flavour. Siddhu placed his iPhone on the counter to record the conversation. Rieux had begun talking before he could take out his notebook and had already veered off-topic to Siddhu’s recently published retrospective on the first anniversary of the Annex. “The headline described the development as ‘inevitable,’ like the area was being remade in the image of the rest of the city,” said the doctor.

/>   “I was there. I spoke to activists and the big shots when the discussions and protests were underway,” Siddhu said. “I don’t know about ‘inevitable,’ but the article was written from today’s perspective.” He wanted to say that, in retrospect, the outcome seemed “predictable.”

  “People don’t want to talk about it,” Rieux said. “Nowadays they can drive through without locking their doors. But there’s a reason why the previous mayor lost the election. What was here before—the people, the problems—may have been swallowed up, but they haven’t gone away.”

  “I won an award for my Annex coverage,” Siddhu said. He instantly regretted sounding so defensive. “And the editor wrote the headline.”

  “It’s a matter of language. Inevitability suggests futility. Why try if we’re going to lose?”

  This was a person who argued to pass the time, Siddhu noted. “My story concerns the new outreach counsellor,” he finally said.

  Rieux’s knowledge of policies toward displaced patients was general. “We want everyone to receive care,” he insisted. “A patient is a patient.” Siddhu would still need to interview the actual counsellor. The doctor had apparently agreed to talk with him only to set him straight on the headline’s word choice. Jesus. And yet he didn’t have the airs of a crank or know-it-all. He was too aloof. Rieux’s emotional reserve was borne of his role as a doctor. Siddhu could never work in medicine; as a metro-beat reporter, earlier in his career, he’d covered fires and car accidents, beelining to be the first to interview firefighters and police officers, bracing himself before he approached the families who’d lost homes or loved ones. Now, he buckled at the sight of a child in pain.

  It was clearing outside when they parted. Siddhu was preoccupied by a blade of light against a skyscraper in the distance when he felt something at his feet. He’d kicked a dead rat. Blood was coming out of its eyes.

  He kept his gaze trained on the sidewalk until he was back in the newspaper building. Before he stepped into his office, he washed his hands in the washrooms by the elevator. A tall, broad-shouldered man, the kind of man who wore glasses to mute his dazzling handsomeness, stepped out of a stall.

  Previously famous as a real-estate marketer and a social entrepreneur, Romeo Parsons possessed a baseline demeanour of ironic detachment from the niceties of social life. Whenever he glad-handed in front of reporters, he made sure to signal that he was playing a role. To offset that cynical aftertaste, he staged moments of unguarded pleasure. Last week, he broke off from his daily 5K to join a group of teenagers playing basketball. A video of him making a jump shot was widely shared and re-posted. As a result of his public gestures, people felt pre-acquainted with him.

  “We’ve met, right?” Parsons asked as he took the sink next to Siddhu.

  “I’ve been part of your press scrums,” Siddhu told him.

  “Of course,” he said. He jogged his finger toward him. “Hey, did you write the piece about the anniversary of the Annex”—a vein on his neck bulged when he used that word—“last week? I made my staff read the entire story. I’m reminded of something Joseph Stalin said, something about how one death is a tragedy —”

  “A million is a statistic.”

  Parsons beamed. “You get it. People act as though the epidemic vanished, but it’s the advocates like you who make us see the consequences of inaction. We need more stories like yours.”

  The new mayor slapped him across his shoulder before he left Siddhu alone at the hot-air dryer. Siddhu returned to the newsroom where everyone had repositioned themselves at their work terminals, back to their unionized jobs with purpose. They stared at their screens with curtailed grins and scrabbled away at their keyboards. It was as if Parsons was Santa Claus and could see them being nice.

  Siddhu had always considered inspirational books written by motivational speakers and pored over by his two success-driven brothers—each of whom had an extra column line in their investment accounts—to be the energy drinks of professional life. To feel inspired, as he did now, left him twitchy, jumpy. He was perched for the sugar crash. It was inevitable.

  4.

  We now introduce our final witness, Megan Tso, on her flight from Hong Kong to Vancouver. She was pleased to be placed next to an empty seat. Since she’d been travelling so much, a thirteen-hour stretch without brushing elbows with a co-passenger, a place to put her laptop and e-reader, and a spare tray where she could leave her hot towel and glass of ice water—all of this gave her enough space to appreciate humanity.

  She updated the talk she’d just given in Guangzhou. While there, she spoke about death as the impetus for ritual and then of its place in many civilizations, with references to social media. She took a selfie at her family’s ancestral home, which received her eight-hundredth “like” before the plane ascended. Her social media popularity was a dubious achievement, and at least five of those likes were from dummy accounts created by Markus.

  Then she took a two-hour train back to Hong Kong, gave the same talk based on her book, The Meaning of Death, and had dinner with aunts and uncles and cousins, relatives on her mother’s side, eager to see her, and oversolicitous. Now she was on this flight for her final two engagements in Vancouver, which were spaced nearly a week apart.

  Once she got home to Los Angeles from Canada, she would have been away for a month: L.A.-Chicago-Madrid-Seoul-Guangzhou-Hong Kong-Vancouver. She’d cycled through her outfits five times and had spent nearly a four-figure sum—an entire speaking fee—on hotel laundry and dry cleaning. She’d run out of toothpaste and lost her favourite notebook. Now she thought of getting home as the next stage in a triathlon—a chance to exhaust yet another set of muscles.

  Before leaving, she’d quit her job of six years as an editor at an academic press. Tso had loved her job and hated freelancing and was barely afloat despite her book’s unexpected success, but she’d needed to quit. She needed the bandwidth.

  After she returned to Los Angeles, she planned to move her belongings out of the storage locker. Her first temporary address, a dog-sitting stint, was in peril because the rescued greyhound’s owner, a documentary filmmaker, was no longer certain that funding was secure for his three-month stint in Appalachia.

  Don’t think about stuff.

  To soothe herself, in her head she tallied the air miles she’d accumulated and imagined them like stars in the sky. She fell asleep tracing them behind her eyelids. Airplane sleep was a fraction as restful as it was in one’s own bed, but when practiced well, it was a form of teleportation. One could nod off when the plane was lit like a cave, then wake with all the lights on and the flight attendants scurrying to their seats for touchdown. This time, Tso roused herself awake after forty-five minutes and watched parts of three movies. Her suitcase was the first of many black cloth bags to emerge on the conveyor belt; she grabbed it and dashed to the taxi stand. If traffic wasn’t terrible, if check-in didn’t take too long, she’d have enough time to take a shower and lie on a bed for another forty-five minutes before she was picked up and taken to the lecture venue.

  She had been to Vancouver once before, a decade earlier, on a summer road trip with college friends. Tso remembered beautiful days and cool nights and seeing so many other Asians that she felt both comforted and swarmed. (She hadn’t been to Asia yet.) This time, she felt like she was seeing the city indoors under fluorescent office lights. The patches of lawn that she glimpsed driving across town even resembled grey carpeting. The hotel overlooked the beach and backed onto a park, but sat on the edge between quaint and grubby.

  Her plan to rest was thwarted on multiple fronts. When she got to her hotel room, she knew something was wrong as soon as she lifted her suitcase onto the luggage stand. She unzipped it and found a package of Chinese sausage inside, not the silk pyjamas that she remembered placing at the top layer of her packing. While she looked for an ID tag, the phone in her room rang. Her event’s organizer started to apologize for arriving early. “I can wait in the lobby until you’re read
y,” the woman said with the voice of someone preemptively disappointed. Tso told her that she would go downstairs immediately. She would have to deal with her luggage later.

  Her guide—also the organizer of the event—was a woman named Janice Grossman. There was a look that people who organized death-related events cultivated. It wasn’t so plainly “alt” as a high-school goth aesthetic, though black was often a default clothing choice. White people liked to dye their hair black. (Tso had purple highlights.) Grossman’s frizzy hair was tinted grey, but she otherwise followed that look. She looked to be in her mid-forties, a decade older than Tso, and wore chunky brass rings that seemed to be refashioned from antique door hinges and brown leather boots. In place of a sign with Tso’s name, she clutched a copy of The Meaning of Death to her chest.

  “Sorry again for being early—the traffic was better than I expected,” Grossman said, and Tso was reminded that “sorry” was a form of punctuation in Canada. Her talk was going to be at a converted adult cinema, followed by a reception at Grossman’s house that Tso had already been dreading. “Normally, the other promoter would introduce you,” she said. “But he’s come down with the flu. There’s something going around. He has a condo in the Annex—and that place is haunted. I’ll host, but I don’t enjoy the limelight.”

  There was no problem with traffic, and they had a parcel of time to kill that iPhone games and pocket novels had been designed for—a time best spent alone. Instead, Grossman suggested sushi. “Most of the sushi places here are run by Chinese, but this is Japanese,” Grossman told her. “Not that that matters,” she added quickly. “I live two blocks from here. My father and I come here all the time.”

  “Do you two live together?” Tso asked, as she signalled the waitress for more tea.

  “Yes and no.” Her father owned a large house that had been divided into apartments decades earlier. Since he was over eighty years old, she had taken on property management on top of her work as a guide on a city bus tour and volunteer for the arts community. “Downstairs in the house is a commercial space that used to be a corner grocery store. Across the hall, there’s my dad, and I share the upstairs suites with a tenant. I have the biggest place—until recently, I was living with my spouse.”