Kevin Chong - The Plague

“I would be more informal.”

She dipped her nose and looked at him as though to say, You? They agreed to come up with a better idea. Rieux wanted to help the most people possible. He did not know if that meant saving lives. He wasn’t having much luck on that end. He would settle for a reduction in suffering. At worst, it meant that they exhausted themselves in futility.

In any other year, about one hundred and fifty people died in Vancouver every week. At the height of the infection, that rate doubled. Not all of those extra fatalities were the direct result of infectious disease. While in terror of fleas and human contact, people were not living healthy lives. They drank and ate too much and indulged in reckless behaviour to dispel their fears of mortality. They argued over insignificant matters, like driving etiquette. The number of patients admitted to hospitals for alcohol poisoning and injuries resulting from physical violence spiked. An already strained medical system experienced further stress. The rate of drug overdoses, for reasons that exceed our capacity to supply plausible explanations, did not change.

Rieux didn’t know exactly what damage Dr Orla Castello had brought upon herself. The health emergency seemed to bring new purpose to her life. She lived to work, shuttling between conference calls, broadcast interviews with international news outlets, and visits to hospitals. She no longer seemed preoccupied, and the colour had returned to her face. She quipped and smiled as she hung around for a second cup of coffee with her old student. But this reinvigorated woman wasn’t the same person that Rieux had known, nor did she seem to behave like someone who had moved past her son’s untimely death.

On the day of the parole hearing, he went directly from the clinic to the downtown courthouse. Castello was waiting for him by the security checkpoint. “This feels like we’re going on a trip,” she said as she placed her purse in a tray. “Why put yourself through this if you don’t get a vacation?” They were led by a uniformed man who identified himself as a parole board employee into a room with a video conference setup on a laptop. The guard closed the door from inside.

The parole hearing was being held outside the city limits, in the Federal Penitentiary in New Westminster. At the last hearing, she and Victor had both attended in person. “I don’t know whether this teleconference makes things better,” Castello said to Rieux as she placed her trembling hand in his. “The last time I went, I wanted to look him in the eye. He stared at his lap when I spoke. He only looked up when someone on the parole board asked him a question.”

Initially, the laptop screen showed a table in another room. The hearing officer and parole board members entered the room. The hearing officer stepped in front of the camera and introduced herself. The meeting would begin shortly.

The door of the meeting room opened and Victor Castello appeared. He was dressed in the wool suit he’d worn to his law firm that morning. He was a broad-shouldered man with side-swept black hair, olive skin, and small black eyes. Once he pulled off his face mask, he revealed a muzzle of stubble. Victor had once been a member of his university wrestling team, and his thick arms made him look like a construction worker. Years ago, Rieux had helped Victor and Adam build a garden shed on the Castellos’ property while sharing a case of beer. Even Adam, who was only sixteen at the time, was allowed a Pilsner.

Victor pulled a chair over next to Rieux, not his ex-wife. He arched a brow at Rieux and grunted. “I didn’t have time to write a statement,” Victor said to Orla Castello without exchanging a greeting. “I expect you have something prepared.”

“Leave it to me,” Orla said. “As always.”

The man responsible for Adam Castello’s death appeared on the laptop. He must have been in his mid-twenties, but he looked like a teenager. Philip Nguyen was slight, with a full, strawberry-red mouth and a messy mop of black hair that fell across his eyes. He took a seat across from the two parole board members and was accompanied by his parole officer.

Rieux noticed that Victor Castello’s hands turned into mallets in his lap, and his breathing grew audible.

The hearing officer began with formalities and introductions. She asked Orla Castello whether she wanted to read her victim impact statement at the beginning of the meeting or toward the end. Castello cleared her throat and said she would read the statement near the end.

The two parole board members began to question Nguyen about his background. He grew up without a father, idolizing an older brother who was a member of a gang. He would accompany his brother and a friend as they delivered weed. When the brother was imprisoned for assault, that friend asked if he wanted to take his brother’s place. Nguyen became part of a group that shoplifted clothes and electronics. He made dial-a-dope deliveries. One day, his brother’s friend gave him a gun and told Nguyen to prove himself. He needed to “seriously hurt” someone who’d double-crossed the friend’s boss.

Adam Castello’s death was the result of mistaken identity. Rieux already knew this from news reports during the trial that he and Elyse would read to each other at night before they fell asleep. Nguyen was shown the image of the person he needed to hurt. One night, he asked around at a party where his target was rumoured to be. Someone told Nguyen that he was wearing a specific type of sneakers. Adam Castello wore the same sneakers and roughly resembled the image Nguyen had seen. When Nguyen confronted him inside the house, Adam reacted. He was bigger than Nguyen and was also sensitive to slights—not someone who would back down from outbursts of machismo. Adam was likely intoxicated when he punched Nguyen and pushed him over a couch. Nguyen was embarrassed. He waited until Adam stepped outside to piss in the bushes. Nguyen shot him in the back.

“What was going through your mind when it happened?” a parole board member asked.

“You don’t have a choice,” he answered. “If I didn’t do something, people would find out. And then I would be the one who had to pay for it. I knew it was a bad idea.”

The Castellos listened as Nguyen expressed his remorse. Victor Castello’s face reddened. Orla Castello’s expression remained unchanged. Rieux thought, Were there medieval painters who had already rendered their agony? Their faces made his fingers itch for his iPhone to check.

Nguyen faltered at times, and in one of these moments the parole officer spoke up about his client’s clean record in prison and his ability to calm others. He said that Nguyen had studied plumbing in prison. His older brother, who was already paroled, was now an apprentice plumber and had plans to start a family business. Nguyen wanted to leave prison to join him and help their mother.

“Do you have any final statements to add?” the parole board member asked.

The screen had shown Nguyen’s face in profile. He had not looked into the camera at the Castellos, not even when he described his regret. Now he turned from the two parole board members to look at the parents of the man he killed on the laptop screen.

“Being here, unable to go where I please, has made me appreciate what I had taken for granted,” he said. “At night I dream about running in a field. Driving a car. Being at the beach. Seeing the stars at night.” He shook his head. His voice cracked. “If I get a chance, I won’t mess up. I don’t want to hurt my mother more than I have.”

Rieux watched Castello unclasp a black leather shoulder bag. He saw a bottle of water and a bottle of prescription pills. From an interior compartment, she removed a piece of folded paper. She held the text from her written statement in her hands. As Nguyen concluded his remarks, Rieux caught glimpses of her text. She wrote of depression and anxiety. She wrote about her broken marriage.