Kevin Chong - The Plague

Rieux shook his head. “I’m married.”

“Let me repay you,” Khan said. His chin kept bobbing as he offered him alcohol, drugs, weapons. He seemed agitated that Rieux acted without need for reciprocation.

“I’m just glad your associate is doing well,” Rieux answered. “But if you want to do anything, you might consider volunteering for the Sanitation League.”

This prompted laughter from Khan. “I’m sorry. I am just too busy.” His attention turned to Siddhu, who seemed on the verge of speaking. “My friend, I have not forgotten you. Are you ready to go home? And when? Tonight?”

Siddhu’s eyes widened. “I might need another day,” he said. “I want to talk to my boss. I should pack.”

It became clear to Rieux that Siddhu had been biding his time. The reporter wanted to know about the type of boat they would use, whether he needed to swim, what he should bring, and the potential risks involved. Siddhu started to mop his brow with a McDonald’s paper napkin. He was so eager that he crowded Khan’s space, forcing him to step back with a nervous smile.

Khan told him that he could not provide the answers yet. He would call tomorrow. “It will be in the middle of the night. Get your rest.”

They were placed in the back of the cube truck again. “By now,” Siddhu said in the dark, “I think I could find the warehouse. I know the turns he takes by heart. He even adds an extra loop in the Best Buy parking lot as misdirection.”

“I’m not positive Khan’s associate was all that sick,” Rieux observed. “If he had what everyone else had, he’d still be recovering. That guy was practically bouncing off the walls.”

“He was probably tired from smuggling,” Siddhu suggested. “Caught the flu. Everybody either under-reacts or over-reacts.”

When the truck’s doors opened again, the sky had already given way to the night’s scowl, even though it was only four o’clock in the afternoon. They were on the street by Rieux’s car, opposite an auto-body shop.

“Do you mind if I drive?” Siddhu asked cheerfully. “It’s been two months.”

Rieux handed him the keys. They sat in the car waiting for the windows to de-fog. Siddhu seemed disfigured by his giddiness. It made Rieux’s skin crawl. And yet he had known about Siddhu’s scheme all along and even sympathized with him. But when he imagined Siddhu on the other side of the gates, he became enraged.

Siddhu drove the car to the Best Buy parking lot. Rieux already knew that the reporter was trying to find Khan’s warehouse. The doctor found Siddhu’s curiosity obnoxious.

“Where do you think the boat leaves from?” Siddhu asked. “All the marinas are under lock and key.”

“I don’t think you should go,” Rieux said. “You’ve been a good addition to our brigade. I would be disappointed in you if you left.”

Siddhu stopped the car. His hands tightened on the steering wheel. “My family needs me.”

“I understand your emotional wants. But people are dying, and we can help them. Escaping would be cowardice.”

Something seemed to back up inside Siddhu’s eyes. Then that thing hurtled up against his face.

“I always thought the Sanitation League was a modest initiative by someone with heroic impulses,” he told Rieux. “And yet we are risking our own lives by going into so many infected homes. You made your volunteers sign waivers. At the end of the day, we could be saving more lives if we all stayed at our sinks washing our hands.”

Rieux did not reply. Siddhu started the car again and turned the radio up loud. “And I know the real reason why you don’t want me to go,” he shouted over the music.

“What’s that?” Rieux asked.

“You need me as a chaperone. You don’t want to be alone with Megan. Because you don’t understand your own emotional wants. ”

It took Rieux longer than necessary to absorb his friend’s insinuation. “That’s not true.”

“You can deny it if you like. In any case, you still have your mother and Janice to keep you two apart.”

He blinked twice. He felt both shame and relief. “Does she know?”

Siddhu shook his head. “She’s got other things on her plate.” They stopped outside the city transfer station where garbage normally sat before it was relayed to the landfill in Delta. Presently, excess waste was collecting on a barge in the Fraser River. “I guess Farhad did a better job in hiding his tracks than I thought he did,” he said. He took a breath, then added: “I cheated on my wife before. I don’t recommend it.”

“You did?”

“We had just gotten married at the time, the kids weren’t born yet. But I did. With the woman my parents didn’t want me to marry.”

“Was she non-Indian?” Rieux asked.

Siddhu’s eyelids quivered. “Why does it matter? Just because I’m from an Indian immigrant background doesn’t mean my family is interchangeable with, like, say, the family in a magazine article you read on a plane.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But yes, she was white. And she was older and already had a kid. And she didn’t finish high school. What I’m saying is that there were other things that a non-immigrant, non-Asian family would also object to.”

“ I’m sorry. ”

“Forget about it. As I was saying, Uma and I were not getting along. She was visiting family in Ontario. It was always easier with this other woman. We fought all the time, but when we fought, everything got said and then it was done. With Uma, an argument from the week before can flitter around you like a swarm of gnats. And so I called this old flame up when her kid was with his dad. I wanted to see what it was like to be with her again. I’d always done the right thing until I didn’t. I remember waking up, going to her bathroom. She had dug up my old toothbrush. I started brushing my teeth. I kept looking at myself and thinking about my toothbrush at home. I thought about how the bed at home was still unmade on one side.”

The last half of Siddhu’s story was told through choked sobs. Rieux was uncomfortable with his friend’s display. He patted him on the arm, but soon found himself pulled into the reporter’s damp embrace.

“I don’t want to leave you all. And part of me is afraid of seeing Uma,” Siddhu admitted. “I feel so bad.”

Rieux felt like a marsupial in his mother’s pouch.

“I do, too,” he said into Siddhu’s chest. “Look, when Elyse got sick, I tried to find the best oncologist and walk her through the stages of treatment. Her friends told me to visit handicraft websites so I could make her an advent calendar she could use to count down her treatments. That’s how hard I tried. I wanted to do all this because I didn’t want to feel what she was feeling. I wanted to help her to ignore her suffering.”

The authors of this account debated the inclusion of this passage. They were mindful of the hurt it might induce. What swayed them was the underlying principles of this story: to describe, honestly and fully, life during this moment in our city’s history. We wanted to show how this calamitous intervention reconfigured our decisions and values. And so any changes in behaviour that arose from our reactions to the disease and the subsequent quarantine were to be included. Even those who never so much as coughed during this period—and that would be the majority of the citizens—felt themselves deformed by the disease.

As the city’s funeral parlour and crematorium staff worked at full capacity, the demand for funeral services prompted them to become creative. Churches offered after-dinner funeral services, for example, and some funeral-home chapels either overlooked the presence of alcohol at their evening services or offered their own cash bars for whatever booze they could find and mark up. Families of the bereaved also utilized unusual venues.