Kevin Chong - The Plague

Khan suggested that Dr Rieux come to care for his so-called brother. Khan would provide whatever medicine or equipment was required. They would find a private nurse. “We just need a good doctor to make my brother healthy,” he told them. “You know if you take care of my friend, I will take care of you.”

“Do you get your goods by boat?” Siddhu asked. His attention still lay with the warehouse outside—the smuggling operation.

Khan shrugged. “Some of them. What do you need?”

He explained that his family was in Surrey. “What’s your price to get me back home?”

“It would be … significant,” Khan said. In his Costco-purchased clothing, Siddhu looked like someone whose wants exceeded his means. “The last time we tried we were almost caught.”

“What if Rieux helps with your … brother?” he whispered.

Khan’s nose lifted as though he was taking in the smell of a good idea. “Then it would be our gift to you, my friend.”

Grossman’s tenant guided them back to the cube truck. They rode in the darkness of the cargo hold again. When the door opened, they grimaced in the daylight and glare of grey ice.

As Grossman drove them back to the hotel, Siddhu remained silent. But his face seemed to glow as he processed the possibility, and risk, of an escape.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Grossman told them outside the hotel. “Once I drop off the phone with Rieux, I’m going to work on my book. I’ll sanitize, too. Is it weird to say I had a lot of fun?”

Siddhu suggested to Tso that they get dinner together in the hotel restaurant. The restaurant’s meals had deteriorated after a line cook fell ill. Thankfully, he’d gotten sick at home. The restaurant might have closed—although people had become lax with sanitary measures that had seemed ineffectual. They had already eaten every dish on the menu, continually revised and diminished, several times over.

Tso agreed to dinner but first wanted to change into a fresh set of clothes. Siddhu said he’d do the same.

“Do you hate me for wanting to leave?” Siddhu asked as they waited for the elevator. “You’ve hardly spoken to me.”

“I thought you were the one being quiet.”

“Who knows if Bernard will agree to help Khan’s friend? But I’ve been away from my family too long.” He leaned back against the elevator wall and sighed. “I want to help you guys too. Janice was right. Today was fun.”

“I’m not mad at you. I don’t think you’re wrong. I’ll just miss having someone to meet for drinks. And I think the judge has a crush on me, so … But you need to see your family. I get that.”

The elevator opened to their floor. Tso thought about the anemones in her room and felt her heart pulse as she stared down the hallway. Maybe it was the judge. “Would you mind coming to my door?” she asked Siddhu. She briefly explained about the flowers from last night. “It’s probably nothing.”

They arrived at her door. She inserted her card into the lock and stepped inside. The bed was made, the pile of used bath towels had been whisked from the floor, and the anemones remained on the desk where she left them. Nothing looked askance. She thanked Siddhu and told him to get a table downstairs. “Order me a rye and ginger if the server comes before I get there,” she added. “I won’t be long.”

She washed her hands and changed. Then she sat on the bed. It felt good to elevate her feet. Maybe she was invincible in addition to being noble. She had vanquished the dissatisfaction that had been following her around in the past couple of months and no longer felt too busy to be able to do anything well.

She was looking out the window when she heard buzzing. She’d left her phone on her desk by the flowers.

The Caller ID read “Unknown.” She knew better than to answer random callers, but if it was who she feared, she didn’t want to avoid him. She could only hope to put him off for so long. The voice was unmistakeable.

“Anemones are flowers for the forsaken,” he told her.

“Markus.”

“I missed your voice.”

“Where are you?” she asked. She needed to look up whether restraining orders could be enforced across countries.

“On your side of the gates,” he told her. “I could tell you needed me.”

Before he had hung up, she was out the door.

New Year’s celebrations in Vancouver were more muted than usual. By year’s end, the death rates had fluctuated to the point that some people were optimistic. Although the unusually heavy snowfall had interrupted the plans of many, the holiday season was not without merriment. People who had spent the past two months in their homes eating canned food now went out to see family and take in the Christmas lights. Some went to church. Many of them had put their calendar-watching aside. They’d stopped waiting, if only for a week. In the middle of the night, fireworks were going off again, startling Rieux from sleep.

On Christmas day, the doctor invited his new friends over for Chinese hot pot. The phone rang as the first loads of watercress and beef were placed in the bubbling broth. Mrs Rieux was closest to the phone in the living room. She handed it to her son.

Rieux had not heard his wife’s voice in more than two weeks, when she’d left a voicemail. It had been a month since they’d actually spoken. Elyse had then seemed concerned about Rieux, but she also sounded distracted, perhaps drugged. She now sounded certain about the decisions she had made and would make in the future.

“I miss you now,” she said. “I never understood people who go on about missing the people they’re leaving the minute they step out the door. I used to text ‘I miss you already’ when I went on a business trip. I was lying. It should take time to miss people. It took me a little longer than I wanted.”

“I feel that way, too,” he confessed. “I didn’t miss you at all. I got caught up with everything.”

Elyse could hear Siddhu laughing in the background and Grossman and Tso’s voices. Rieux told her who they were and remembered that she didn’t know them.

He could have said that he felt guilty, as well, for having forgotten about her for days at a time. For entertaining the idea that her passing in Mexico might make it easier for him to grieve. For thinking of her already in the past tense. For ignoring her system of organizing paper and plastic recycling. For putting her toiletries in a box and placing it in her closet. For thinking of her as a character in a movie he once loved. And for other things he couldn’t yet admit to himself.

They stayed on the phone together for a few more minutes but exchanged barely any words. It had been a long time since they’d been silent together. There had been fraught silences, but this was one of their sweet silences. Their wordless conversation felt choreographed, as though they were both following a musical score, waiting for their extended rest to break before they offered their final holiday salutations and returned to their Christmas dinners.

“Are you there?” Tso asked after Rieux returned to his place at the table. She was seated next to him.

“Sorry—what?” he asked.

“I asked you whether you wanted a fish ball.”

He smiled. “Always.”

By the New Year, the Sanitation League had grown to encompass a team of two dozen volunteers, including a few doctors and nurses who admired (and were amused by) Rieux. Our story’s nominal protagonist had hoped it would become a city-wide effort spanning age, ethnicity, and income but tried not to reveal his disappointment at its actual scale. Tso would have teased him for wanting to become a disease “disruptor.” This was not true. He only wanted to help as many people as possible. It did, however, bother him. He’d thought the League was a good idea.