Kevin Chong - The Plague

She had been to Vancouver once before, a decade earlier, on a summer road trip with college friends. Tso remembered beautiful days and cool nights and seeing so many other Asians that she felt both comforted and swarmed. (She hadn’t been to Asia yet.) This time, she felt like she was seeing the city indoors under fluorescent office lights. The patches of lawn that she glimpsed driving across town even resembled grey carpeting. The hotel overlooked the beach and backed onto a park, but sat on the edge between quaint and grubby.

Her plan to rest was thwarted on multiple fronts. When she got to her hotel room, she knew something was wrong as soon as she lifted her suitcase onto the luggage stand. She unzipped it and found a package of Chinese sausage inside, not the silk pyjamas that she remembered placing at the top layer of her packing. While she looked for an ID tag, the phone in her room rang. Her event’s organizer started to apologize for arriving early. “I can wait in the lobby until you’re ready,” the woman said with the voice of someone preemptively disappointed. Tso told her that she would go downstairs immediately. She would have to deal with her luggage later.

Her guide—also the organizer of the event—was a woman named Janice Grossman. There was a look that people who organized death-related events cultivated. It wasn’t so plainly “alt” as a high-school goth aesthetic, though black was often a default clothing choice. White people liked to dye their hair black. (Tso had purple highlights.) Grossman’s frizzy hair was tinted grey, but she otherwise followed that look. She looked to be in her mid-forties, a decade older than Tso, and wore chunky brass rings that seemed to be refashioned from antique door hinges and brown leather boots. In place of a sign with Tso’s name, she clutched a copy of The Meaning of Death to her chest.

“Sorry again for being early—the traffic was better than I expected,” Grossman said, and Tso was reminded that “sorry” was a form of punctuation in Canada. Her talk was going to be at a converted adult cinema, followed by a reception at Grossman’s house that Tso had already been dreading. “Normally, the other promoter would introduce you,” she said. “But he’s come down with the flu. There’s something going around. He has a condo in the Annex—and that place is haunted. I’ll host, but I don’t enjoy the limelight.”

There was no problem with traffic, and they had a parcel of time to kill that iPhone games and pocket novels had been designed for—a time best spent alone. Instead, Grossman suggested sushi. “Most of the sushi places here are run by Chinese, but this is Japanese,” Grossman told her. “ Not that that matters ,” she added quickly. “I live two blocks from here. My father and I come here all the time.”

“Do you two live together?” Tso asked, as she signalled the waitress for more tea.

“Yes and no.” Her father owned a large house that had been divided into apartments decades earlier. Since he was over eighty years old, she had taken on property management on top of her work as a guide on a city bus tour and volunteer for the arts community. “Downstairs in the house is a commercial space that used to be a corner grocery store. Across the hall, there’s my dad, and I share the upstairs suites with a tenant. I have the biggest place—until recently, I was living with my spouse.”

She let that last statement sit as she dipped her sashimi. People always wanted to confide in Tso, who considered a response. She decided to check the time on her phone. Finally, when that piece of sashimi was completely tanned in soy, she nodded and said, “My fiancé and I split up early in the year.”

Grossman’s face took on an energy that wasn’t there before. “It’s the worst, isn’t it?”

This woman probably meant something else by worst, Tso thought. It hadn’t been that bad, especially on the road. She could block Markus’s e-mails and he hadn’t yet learned her new cellphone number. He hated air travel, so the distance had made her feel safe. “I’m still processing it,” she said.

“It is a process.” She repeated, “ Pro -cess,” Canadian-style. “Janet moved out six months ago.” Hi, we’re Janet and Janice, Tso thought to herself. “I called her so much in the first month that she changed all her information. Eventually, she wrote me a letter. And then two more letters. I haven’t opened them. Since she wanted more space, I figure I needed more time.” Grossman asked for the bill. “We should go. I’ll tell you more about it at the party.”

The converted porn theatre was entirely respectable, even with the vintage nudes in the bathroom and the old marquee above the bar. This would be the “fun” event, the one that brought her to the city early; another, more mysterious obligation paid much more and justified her extended trip. Tonight’s event was conducted like a lecture series with talks to be given by an embalmer and a spiritualist, as well as two others besides Tso. Grossman was, as promised, a jittery host, whose remarks tended to crumple in mid-sentence. Tso was saved for last. She felt like a jukebox, able to recite her speech, even the ad-libbed moments, as though it were etched into her throat.

As she gave her remarks, pausing for chuckles, a parallel talk took shape in her mind. This was the book I wrote after I volunteered for six months, writing down life stories at a hospice, she thought, but I got a nice book advance—one I had to burn through to pay for the lawyers to throw a legal firewall between me and Markus — and the marketing manager told me to tell funny stories about the mummies of the Atacama Desert to make you feel comfortable about turning cemeteries into picnic spaces and taxidermying your pets. This is one of the reasons Markus used to say I was crazy.

She got through the talk and signed forty-six copies of her book. This was pleasant. People spoke to her as though they’d read her book; they edged toward her like they were at a high-school dance. Their opening remarks felt rehearsed in their heads but not in their mouths. They posed for photos with her.

Tso watched Grossman strike down the stage and move folding chairs into the back room by herself. She meant to help, but one of the readers had bought her a glass of wine. The group of attendees, a dozen of them, had already been invited to Grossman’s reception, and they all piled into cabs. Tso was pulled along. They arrived at a big house with an abandoned grocery store on the main floor and a side door with three separate mailboxes next to it, each one a different shape and colour. Grossman hadn’t come back with them, but they pressed her buzzer. When there was no response on the intercom, another person in the group knocked on the door. An older man answered promptly. He had the same frizzy hair as Grossman, but he was bald on top and the hair cascaded from the sides of his head. This—and the buttoned-up pyjamas he wore—gave him the appearance of a mad inventor.

Someone that Tso recognized from the event emerged from a door upstairs. “Come on up!” she told them. Tso watched the group dash up past Mr Grossman until she was the only one left. The door was still open to his ground-floor suite.

“Where’s Janice?” he asked, tightening the collar of his bathrobe. His blue eyes were small, hooded, downturned.

“She’s on her way, Mr Grossman.” She held out her hand. “I’m Megan.”

His nostrils flared as he looked at her hand. He bunched his collar more tightly. “Janice told me about her party,” he said. “Tell her she needs to check on Far-head. He’s still behind on rent and November is coming around. I never wanted to rent to him. And you know what? That doesn’t make me racist. I’m a good judge of character.” Without another word, he turned back into his suite.