Kevin Chong - The Plague

Rieux knew he would say yes. Castello rarely used to make requests. Now they seemed to burst forth, urgent and irate. He’d thought that, at this point, she would mention the barrage of phone calls and text messages she’d sent him, but then it occurred to him that she might not remember them. “It’s much easier for me to administer an injection or set a broken bone,” he said. “Why do you ask me to do such hard things?”

“The answer is so obvious, I feel stupid saying it,” she said. She had removed all the protective gear except for a face mask. “Because you live to help.”

Megan Tso spent three nights on Janice Grossman’s couch after her father’s sudden death. Three nights was enough time to feel as though she’d given of herself to another without the resentment of martyrdom. Although it wasn’t an entire week of sitting shiva, she thought seventy-two hours felt like a traditional interval for helping an acquaintance through a tough time; it was like a “minute of silence” or “forty days in the desert.”

She remembered something she’d read the other day: The term “quarantine” had been coined by plague-struck Venetians in the fourteenth century. “Quarantinario” was Italian for “forty days.” Ships coming into the port city had to wait out that period, while flying a yellow and black flag, before passengers could step foot on the mainland. What Tso wouldn’t give to know that this quarantine would last only forty days—even fifty would be okay. As it was, the word had decoupled from its etymology.

When Grossman texted the news of her father’s death, Tso had already been out on a run to clear her head after the previous night’s boozy outing with Rieux. It was barely eight when she left the hotel. She bought oranges, cereal, and milk at a corner store that had just opened, then took a taxi to Grossman’s.

“They took him into the auxiliary hospital,” Grossman said. “They told me to go home, but I waited. When I spoke to a doctor after he died, he said I couldn’t see the body because of infection, so part of my brain keeps telling me he must’ve switched wristbands with another elderly white male patient.” Her voice was hoarse and emphatic. “I don’t know how someone who never left his apartment, never saw anyone, who hired somebody to wash his kitchen floors with bleach every week, could become infected. If he could fall sick, I may as well run around licking toilet seats.”

Grossman’s gaze swam around the room. Tso forced her to sit and placed a bowl of cereal in front of her. Grossman took a bite and pushed it away. “I don’t even know what I want. Except to clean my dad’s room.”

Tso wanted to be like the white people she’d grown up watching on TV; someone who could stroke a friend or acquaintance like a house pet. Instead, she placed her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. “We can do that later,” she told her. “You’re exhausted.”

“Sorry to text you when I did. My first thought was to call Janet, but then I hated myself for thinking of talking to her. I could imagine her saying nice things to me while Happy Dancing at her house. Janet and my father hated each other. Sorry again,” she told Tso. Milk dribbled on her chin. “ You must be exhausted.”

Tso was cutting oranges. She had already gone for a run, and her knees were stiff. She said, “A little tired.”

“Would you sleep with me?” Grossman asked. “I miss having someone next to me.”

Tso stopped cutting oranges. “ Sleep sleep, right?”

“Of course.” She started rubbing her arms nervously. Everything about this house—the blackout curtains, the candles—gave the impression that Grossman was not a morning person. “I wouldn’t suggest we do that. Just forget I said anything.”

“I would like to sleep with you,” Tso said slowly, sounding like someone reciting from a script for people learning the English language.

Grossman shook her head, though her gaze drifted toward the bedroom. “It would probably be awkward.”

Tso was, in fact, intrigued by the idea of a sleeping partner. For an entire year after she moved in with her aunt, they would spend an hour in her bed at night talking about their plans for the next day. The prospect of being with someone, of feeling someone’s warmth—day in, day out—was something she craved and wanted to be ready for. She refused to take up more than half the king-sized mattress in her hotel suite.

She waited for Grossman to change into her pyjamas and climb onto the air mattress. The bed was pushed up against the wall, and Grossman took the outside half. Tso removed her shoes and jacket but kept the rest of her clothes on. She lay down next to Grossman, arms across her chest, elbow brushing against her friend. She felt self-consciously jittery.

Grossman told her that she planned to call the funeral home when she woke up. Her father had prepaid for his funeral decades earlier and made detailed arrangements. “He didn’t think I could handle it,” she told Tso. “My half-sister lives in Montreal. He always trusted her more. If she were the daughter living in this city, he wouldn’t have preplanned.”

Grossman’s father was much older than Tso had suspected. Born before World War II, he and his parents crossed the Atlantic—first to Brooklyn, then Montreal—before such trips became urgent escapes for Jewish people. Izzy Grossman left school early and found his first restaurant job at age thirteen, then he started to work in the entertainment industry. He moved to Vancouver in 1963, where he met his first wife and started a talent-booking club. He managed a roster of song-and-dance acts. “But he didn’t like the direction music was going in,” she told Tso. “And my dad had an affair with a chorus girl who would eventually become my mother. Once they married, she didn’t approve of his lifestyle.” He briefly ran a comedy club until it burned down. “My mother had left him six months earlier for her high-school sweetheart. Let’s just say that made him careless about fire safety.” With his insurance money, he bought the house and eked out a living through his rental suites and the grocery store. “We’re always talking about me,” Grossman said. “Why don’t you ever talk about yourself?” She lay her head on Tso’s shoulder. She gave the appearance of being larger than she actually was, mainly because of her frizzy hair and wide hips.

“I’m the least interesting person I know,” Tso told her. It was a practiced response to a common question. “When I reminisce, even about the good things, it makes me sad.”

“You talk about your aunt,” Grossman observed through a yawn. “What happened to your parents?”

“My mother died in a car accident,” she lied. “I never knew my dad. He had always been out of the picture. See? Sad .”

Tso felt an urge to talk about how her mother liked to sweep. And how Tso had asked for a child-sized broom to sweep along with her. And how her mother sang under her breath. She would have spoken these thoughts aloud except that Grossman began to snore. Grossman’s arm swung over her, like she was used to hugging someone larger in bed, but Tso decided to let her sleep for another twenty minutes before she wriggled out of the bed. She felt Grossman’s hot breath beat on her shoulders. A puddle of drool collected on her neck.

It would have been a long twenty minutes if Farhad Khan had not knocked. It seemed like he was still singing the same song to himself in Persian as the last time Tso had seen him, three weeks earlier.

“My friend! My saviour!” he said, pulling off his earphones. His skin was the colour of clay and he had a precise beard that looked drawn onto his face. In each ear he wore diamond studs and sported a Lionel Messi soccer jersey. He held a bottle of vodka and a package wrapped in brown paper. “I come home. I see the front door open. I see the door of Mr Izzy open. He is not there, so I come up.” He held up the bottle of vodka. “This is for Mr Izzy.” He held up the brown paper package. “And this is for the daughter, for being my other saviour.”