Kevin Chong - The Plague

As a criminal judge, Oishi was aware of the extent that the law protected Markus more than it did her. He suggested that she get a black-market taser.

“Did you dump him because he was possessive?” he asked.

“He dumped me, ” Tso said. “He hated how messy I was. But then I moved on with my life. He no longer had me to blame for his own failures. So he insisted on harassing me.”

“What’s his end goal?”

“I don’t think it’s to get back together with me. His end goal is just to make me miserable.”

Oishi looked out the passenger window and pointed to one more poster. Tso told him to continue driving. “I wish my wife and I hated each other less. We have so many other things in common,” he said.

The other night, he’d tried to kiss her in the restaurant lounge. He wasn’t her type, but she let him kiss her long enough to entertain but reject the idea of doing more. She missed physical contact. Her body felt like a callous, and she wanted to be touched to regain sensitivity to the world. She imagined herself with Oishi and how it would be afterward, and she could only picture the kind of mutual regret that made former lovers hide behind trees to avoid each other. He knew that, too. When she told him it wouldn’t be a good idea, his apology followed a hot sigh of relief.

They met Grossman at her apartment. Outside, on the sidewalk, she’d placed a sandwich board. In chalk she had written: “Izzy’s Storytelling Night: Come Laugh & Cry at the Plague.” Grossman had cooked a roast with Yorkshire pudding before the performance at her club, and the smell of the meat rendered Tso wobbly with hunger. And Grossman was making real gravy.

Afterward, they helped her get ready for the event. Grossman had reimagined the ground-floor studio as a performance space that she named “Izzy’s” after her father. She had commissioned a neon-style LED sign with the name and an illustration of her father’s face—younger, eyes a-twinkle in a way that Tso never saw firsthand—that hung outside the front door. Inside was a small stage. A vintage bar had been installed.

It took Tso a moment to notice the bare walls. “What did you do with all of Janet’s paintings?” she asked Grossman. “Did you return them to her?”

“Sort of,” Grossman said. “Janet believed that I was in wrongful possession of her creative work. She was right. But those paintings all featured my image. At no time did she ask me whether I wanted to be in her paintings. So I returned them to her with my likeness cut out with an X-Acto knife. I’d always felt invisible in our relationship and even when Janet painted me, she painted me the way she wanted other people to see me. The holes I made in her work make it more honest.” She filled Tso and Oishi’s respective wine glasses before filling her own. “What do you think? Does that sound psycho?”

Tso removed the torn poster from the back pocket of her jeans and held it up. “You’ll have to up your game.”

Grossman nodded at the poster. “Why don’t we get Khan to take care of that nuisance?” she asked.

Oishi looked puzzled. Tso quickly explained the situation with Grossman’s tenant and his role as a fixer and procurer. They had called on him recently to acquire additional vaccine, and it came through the next day.

“What could Khan do?” Tso replied. “Send him off on the garbage barge? He’d only end up back here.”

Grossman stared up at the ceiling. “He could do other things.” When Tso didn’t respond to the insinuation, she added: “I bet Khan could find someone burly and unscrupulous to take care of your ex.”

“I already caught your hint.”

They took their places as the event’s start time approached. Oishi stood at the door, taking the cover charge. Fifty folding chairs had been rented for the event, which had only been advertised on social media and in a few local culture blogs. In the first ten minutes after the doors opened only two people had come. Grossman and her friends waited nervously as show time approached. Just before eight o’clock, people came in a cluster, and a line formed outside as Oishi fumbled with change. Grossman poured her guests plastic glasses of red and white wine and offered premixed highballs from cups. A few of the attendees recognized Tso, who worried they had seen her ex’s poster, but they had met her at the after party that followed her book event in October. They thought she’d made it out of the city. Tso’s memory of her first days here felt like keepsakes from another era and world. But only three months had passed since she’d first come to this big house.

The start time needed to be pushed back. Every chair was occupied and they scrambled to find more. People had come out of curiosity. They saw friends they hadn’t spoken to since autumn. The room, initially draughty, was warm with body heat and the air electrified with the smell of booze. Grossman was starting to grow out of her tinted grey hair, and its black roots were showing. She had changed out of her apron and old jeans into a black tuxedo shirt and jacket over hot pants and fishnets. It was the first time Tso had seen her friend looking so femme. She resembled the photos Tso had seen of Grossman’s mother, the dancer. And then she understood her friend’s look to be a salute to both her parents.

As Grossman took the stage, Tso remembered how jittery she’d behaved at the book event and then her pudding-smooth delivery on the tour bus. Her preamble before introducing the first speaker in her roster of storytellers—friends, social-media acquaintances, volunteers for the Sanitation League—was delivered in a confident but off-the-cuff manner.

“This space was created by a cataclysm,” she said shortly after giving the land acknowledgment. “Everyone here has seen a friend or family member or co-worker fall ill. Some of us have lost our livelihoods. Some of us no longer have reasons to get out of bed. When this crisis is done, the city will hire a world-famous artist to build a monument to those who perished. It’ll be fucking beautiful. And I will drive my tour bus around it and talk about how difficult this period was. But who will pay tribute to the rest of us who lived and are still searching for new reasons to get out of bed? Only we can do it. We pay tribute to each other. Tonight, I pay tribute to you.”

The speakers varied in quality. Some spoke with notes and stumbled over their own sentences. Others came off as too polished. One speaker, a professional comedian, made light of his maniacal devotion toward cleanliness that led him to develop a crack addiction to offset the stress. Another storyteller, a florist by trade, spoke of giving birth alone, right after her husband had been hospitalized with the disease. He had been one of the lucky ones, but both she and her partner had felt alone during their respective hospitalizations. As the night continued, Tso realized how far off she had been about Grossman. When they first met, Grossman seemed to her like a professional devotee. She let others take advantage of her to blot out her own thwarted ambitions. But bringing people together—Rieux had incorrectly ascribed this ability to Tso—was her genius. She magnified the talents of others. She (literally) gave them the stage on which they could shine.

Tso and Oishi allowed their friend to play host as they stacked the chairs and collected empty plastic wine glasses. Tso watched the judge throughout the performance. For the first half of the show, he reacted to every comment or laugh line a beat too late. Then he seemed in sync with the rest of the audience. Near the end, he filled his plastic cup to the brim with wine and leaned against the wall.

They finished cleaning and headed to the after-party upstairs. On their way up, they saw Farhad Khan. The smuggler rarely stayed in his apartment, only returning to change his clothes or to move boxes in and out with his associates. He stood at the top of the stairs, ready to fist bump Tso.