Kevin Chong - The Plague

“I don’t have much time so I ordered. Thank you for giving me an excuse to leave the office,” she told him. “I’ve been living there.”

“You seem upbeat,” Rieux told her. “I expected you to look more like a mess.”

In his mind, Rieux aligned the woman before him with the one he had once known. When she set her teacup on its saucer, her trembling made the china clatter. “How is it that you’ve stayed married for so long?” she teased him. “You must raise your compliment-giving game. I’ll be your practice. The stakes are so low.”

He ordered a coffee and panini at the counter and tried to catch a glimpse of her as she watched the scant foot traffic. She seemed grotesquely thin. She was still perfectly made up and wore tailored skirts. But when they’d first met, she had been fuller-bodied, more vigorous. She used to smooth out her fidgety energy with a Negroni; now she needed to bolster it with caffeine and sugar. She had not been the person he knew for many years; he still saw her losing parts of herself and exhibiting the fixations of a careless woman who’d once been curious and delighted with her discoveries.

“How bad is this outbreak?” Rieux asked, settling into the chair.

“ Everything is under control. ” She looked from side to side. Then she added, “We’ve never seen anything like it.”

The infection rates were higher than any other cases of Yersinia pestis recorded in the past two decades. The incubation times were double the normal speed and typical treatments had failed. Hospital staff—a doctor and a nurse—had contracted the pneumonic form of the disease. Another several hundred beds had been dedicated to treatment in an auxiliary hospital in False Creek. The number of deaths, obfuscated in news coverage, had been severe. Still, the Health Authority hesitated to order the proper number of early-detection kits.

“No matter what we do, we’re going to take some heat,” Castello admitted. “Some of it will be deserved. So far, the disease hasn’t spread to other cities, but no one will thank us for that. By the way, I’m so glad Elyse is out of town. Even if she is being swindled in Mexico.”

Elyse Rieux knew nothing about what people were calling “the P-word,” in varying degrees of delicacy, from her Mexican treatment centre. She had sent an e-mail to her husband the night before from an internet café in the town nearest the clinic. She wrote about her tan and the view from her room, and the patient kindness of the doctors and nurses. Rieux needed to write back. He would tell her about seeing Castello—or not. She’d always thought his friendship with her Aunt Orla was odd. His mentor and his wife had known each other since Elyse was in diapers. Elyse had once babysat Castello’s son, Adam.

“She is doing well,” Rieux said. “I would rather she do this than see her waste away.”

Castello shook her head. “It would ruin your eyesight.”

Adam Castello’s funeral was the occasion of Rieux’s first encounter with Elyse. He had been shot in a house in the suburbs. There were circumstances around his death that Castello never talked about. Her son had had a drug problem and the wrong set of acquaintances. In a crowded church meeting room, Elyse introduced herself to Rieux. “Every time I see Aunt Orla, your name comes up,” she said. All the speeches made in tribute to Adam and the sight of Castello being propped up by her husband had made Rieux eye the exit. After speaking to Elyse for five minutes, Rieux knew why Castello had wanted them to meet. They were both slight and fine-boned and liked outdoor activities. He was assertive by nature; she was deferential but knew where she would not budge. He felt at ease with her. She later told him that she’d first noticed his hands. He needed a ride home from the church, she was driving, and both lived on Commercial Drive. They bumped into each other the next day. They had acquaintances in common. It seemed unlikely that they hadn’t seen each other before.

Castello left half of her sandwich untouched. She told Rieux to eat it. Rieux didn’t want it, but wrapped it in a napkin to take home at her insistence. They stepped outside, and he followed her a block in the wrong direction. “Is that all you’re wearing?” she asked him. He had left his jacket at work. She offered him her scarf. He declined.

Rieux should be the one caring for Castello, he thought. Victor had enclosed himself in work. They had long kept separate rooms because of his snoring, but he’d recently moved into a condo of his own. Through Elyse, Rieux knew that Castello had collected her dead son’s clothes from the room he rented in a punk house on Heatley Street. She kept those unwashed clothes in a sealed bag and opened them periodically to recapture his scent.

“Let’s make an appointment again for two weeks from now,” he insisted. “My mother will cook dinner.”

“That sounds delightful,” Castello said, but something streaked through her eyes.

Only as he was turning to his bike, after he handed over the sandwich to a panhandler, did he understand. Castello viewed his mother as a rival. That’s it. Once he had this insight, he feasted on a goulash of feelings. He remembered once being in Adam Castello’s room, which had the ripe smell of a teenaged male. The boy disappeared for long bathroom breaks, and as Rieux waited he looked at his trophy case. “Pokemon Player of the Year.” “The Boy Most Likely to Build the Perfect Sandwich.” “In Recognition of Two Weeks Spent Without Electronics.” These awards, commissioned by the mother of a mediocrity, were tucked behind a set of free weights. Rieux would have denied it, but it burned him inside not to have the chance to earn what this boy accepted so grudgingly.

And Rieux had gotten his wish. Castello had anointed him as her surrogate son even before the real one died.

When he got home, Rieux’s mother was on her knees, back turned to him. “I sent your cleaning lady away,” Mrs Rieux told him. She was scrubbing the bathroom tiles with Dettol. Elyse had declared their house chemical-free before her previous treatment, so the cleaning lady had been using vinegar. Dettol was the British antiseptic that his mother had used to clean when there was illness in the house; Rieux and his sister would be bathed in diluted Dettol. He thought the brand had been discontinued and wondered which Chinese grocer had stockpiled them. Dettol smelled the way he imagined a tree smelled to a robot.

Mrs Rieux took pleasure in asserting her presence in her son’s life. She had chosen to respect the chasm between herself and her daughter-in-law and neither to bridge nor widen it. Filling in the space Elyse left behind, she returned the scents of Rieux’s adolescence: the spice of sandalwood soap in the bathroom, bitter melon in the kitchen—and Dettol. Someone could make a fortune packaging olfactory memory, an album of odours.

They had established a pattern during her stay. She made dinner and asked him about his work. He gave her a point-form version of his day, as she seemed interested only in information that she could use to prove that he worked too hard. For the rest of the evening, as his mother knit, he would have been content to spread out on the couch, reading e-books in the public domain. (As someone whose views could be described as libertarian, Rieux was strictly against copyright, but nonetheless felt uneasy about online piracy.)

“Mom,” he told her. “Let’s go out tonight.”

She looked to him, then turned back to his bathtub. “I made dinner.”

“We can put it away for tomorrow,” he said. “I have tickets for something.” He’d purchased them on his iPhone on his way home. “It’s a surprise.”

“Okay, let me finish here,” she said and continued scrubbing without turning her head.