Kevin Chong - The Plague

He knew that was sarcasm.

They chatted about Judge Oishi and Tso told Siddhu about his daughter. Siddhu asked her about Rieux, but she only mentioned that he looked tired. Then she yawned and said good night.

He returned to bed. Uma was now awake, lying on her side, scrolling through her social media feed on her phone. Her face was pinched. “Sorry,” he told her. “It was a call from a friend.”

“Is that why you’ve been so off?” Uma asked. “I have noticed.”

Siddhu wanted to say the same to her, but he started to weep. Uma wrapped her arms around his shoulders and held him for the first time since the night of his return. He felt her own tears on his arm.

“I need to tell you something,” Uma admitted after he had quieted. “I’ve been seeing someone.”

They both remained still long enough to notice each other’s wet breathing.

“How did you find the time?” he finally asked her.

She sat up on the bed. “Is that really what you want to know?”

“Are you still having an affair?” he asked.

“Yes. But it’s not anyone you know. We met online.”

“Are you in love with him?”

“I don’t know where it’s going. I thought you wouldn’t be back for a while. And then, there you were in the shower one night.”

“Do you still love me?”

She hesitated. “Yes.”

He felt a warmth pooling from separate directions, the sadness in his head and the despair in his body.

They agreed to talk about it the next day, and Uma started to snore within five minutes. Siddhu found himself braced against his edge of the bed. He got up and made the pullout in the spare room, then fell into the middle of the thin mattress like a skydiver and plummeted from the waking world.

In the morning, he heard Uma feeding the kids. Their laughter was brighter around their mother. It was laughter that hadn’t been coaxed.

Siddhu changed in the master bedroom. This was the day Uma’s mother came over from the other side of the duplex to watch the kids. Sometimes she took them to the park so Uma could nap or read a book. Probably Uma used that time to meet her lover. The thought of it made him sob as he ran a toothbrush across his teeth. He took his laptop and grabbed the car keys from the table by the stairs.

At the McDonald’s drive-through he ordered an Egg McMuffin and coffee. He turned off the engine in the parking lot, opened his laptop, and reviewed the latest draft of his story. Once he completed his read-through, he sent it to Horne-Bough along with edited video clips from his hidden camera. He felt the satisfaction, the dread, the relief, of doing something he couldn’t take back. Horne-Bough instantly replied that he would release it in an hour. “This is the story I’ve been waiting for—and you did it all on your own,” he wrote. “Prepare to have your name on the tip of everyone’s tongue.”

Earlier in his life, this would have been a dream realized. Now he dreaded the idea. He did not want his phone to light up. He had seen what happened to Romeo Parsons. The mayor had fallen more quickly than he had risen. Siddhu wanted his daily bread, his daily practice. He wanted all the time available to watch his boys grow up.

He drove to the hardware store and bought a new flapper for the toilet. In the hardware store parking lot, he sent a text to Uma to tell her where he’d gone. “I hope you didn’t need the car,” he wrote. He sent another text to say his story would be posted.

How did they drive into this ditch in their relationship? Uma had attended the same high-school as Siddhu, two grades below him. Her older brother played basketball with him. As a teenager, Siddhu spent an evening on a couch with her watching a Batman movie. He had forgotten about that night until she mentioned it to him seven years later when they found themselves seated next to each other in a banquette of a lounge bar. They were at the birthday party of a mutual friend and he’d had to work to make her laugh. He used to be popular with women, now he couldn’t remember how.

He couldn’t imagine dating again at his age. He felt like a blob.

He checked his phone. Uma wanted to know if he was doing okay. His article still had not appeared. No one would come for him in a patrol car, not yet.

He hated killing time, but he ended up at Guildford Town Centre Mall in Surrey. In the mall, he bought some Duplo blocks and Play-Doh for the boys. He looked at his watch and decided he had enough time to buy himself two new shirts. He had lost weight in quarantine, despite eating at greasy restaurants once or twice a day. It must have been all the walking.

He checked his phone again. The article still hadn’t appeared.

He checked his phone again.

He checked his phone again.

He checked his phone again.

He checked his phone again.

He checked his phone again. This time the website was down.

Then came a text from Uma. “Read this,” she wrote. She’d included a link.

It was from his old newspaper. An image of Horne-Bough loaded onto the screen, a photo taken a few years ago. Horne-Bough was wearing a fedora and an eyebrow ring. The headline loaded afterward: “Media Entrepreneur Charged with Hacking.” The breaking news item was brief. More details were to follow.

An anonymous tip and a cache of information led the RCMP to the arrest. Mostly, staffers within City Hall had been hacked. The mayor’s private email address as well as his web-search history had been hacked. Siddhu figured the whistleblower was one of the disgruntled GSSP staffers who’d left in December. It made so much sense to him now. His own email had probably been compromised. Hadn’t Horne-Bough anticipated his needs well?

Siddhu felt his anticipation dissipate. He was on a hot air balloon that began drifting back to the ground soon after its ascent.

“I guess my story has nowhere to go,” he wrote to Uma. “I’m coming home.”

But all he wanted to do was keep walking around the mall. He had no reason to hurry. And the world had opened its door to him once more.

In the third week of January, as Megan Tso and Jeffrey Oishi were finishing a shift with the Sanitation League, she saw her face on a telephone pole in Strathcona; an image from a vacation she’d taken three years earlier in Berlin, standing against a spray-painted section of its Wall, was placed on a poster under the words, “MISSING SINCE SEPTEMBER 24TH.” It listed her full name, age, height, and weight, and a description of the butterfly tattooed on her ankle. An email address and a cellphone number were given at the bottom of the poster.

Was that why she had gotten those funny looks in the last few days? Were people inspecting her? She tore the poster from the telephone pole and climbed into Oishi’s Audi. As the judge drove, she noticed another poster a block up on Princess Avenue. “Stop the car,” she said. The car caught black ice and slid along the street before coming to a halt.

“What is it?” Oishi asked.

“The hell I escaped.”

They had spent the morning and afternoon taking seniors to get vaccinated. This was his third day riding along with her and he’d held up well. The judge was on leave from work, and his hands shook periodically, but he insisted that this was better than sitting in his hotel room with a bottle of rye and his daughter’s stuffed Arctic seal, scrolling through his iPhone photo album. He was helping people who had gone through this. It made him feel less alone.

Within an hour, both Grossman and Rieux texted her images of the poster in separate neighbourhoods. Each of them told her to call the police. She knew they could do nothing. She had grown accustomed to Markus’s unyielding insistence on her life.