Kevin Chong - The Plague

Tso shook her head. “I don’t think that’s what she meant,” she told Grossman. It’s exactly what she means. She realized again she was in a terrible mood.

Now that Janet was gone, Grossman said that she volunteered for many community arts events. “I’m taking a comedy course, too,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to try stand-up.”

Tso noted silently that Grossman had not attempted a single joke that night while introducing any of the presenters and that she seemed almost divorced from any sense of humour. Months later—when she had a standing order at a restaurant in Vancouver, when the city had been quarantined and she had seen people seriously ill—Tso remembered the restlessness of her first night with yearning. (She yearned for her agency.) By that time, she considered Grossman hilarious and endearingly damaged.

Someone at the party found Grossman and asked her to change the music to something more upbeat. Tso chose this moment to leave the party without a farewell. She crept to the front hall where she attempted to find her shoes from the bottom of the large pile. She took a picture of the shoes and would post it when she got home. She thought of a pithy caption: “This party is ghost-busted.” Once she was outside on the landing, she glanced across to the door of Grossman’s neighbour, Farhad Khan. The door was slightly ajar and the note had been changed.

I have killed myself, it read. Call the police. You do not need to see this.

The floorboards creaked as Tso inched toward the door. She could hear someone groaning. That meant he—Farhad—was alive. She heard a crash, the sound of feet, a body, and then the smack of a head hitting the floor. She jumped back. She would return to Grossman’s apartment and make her go in and see what had happened. Her heart outraced the lazy beat of the eighties party music that had followed Leonard Cohen. Tso spotted Grossman at the far end of the living room, her glass full of ice.

Tso needed to get to her, but the people in the room—and the jovial, tipsy mood within it—made that distance feel impassable. She edged around the wall toward Grossman as the game of Werewolf finally concluded. The remaining participants opened their eyes. The final innocent villager had been killed, and one party-goer, the remaining werewolf, still looked circumspect. “I warned everyone,” one of previously eliminated players complained. “But now we’re all dead.”

Rieux and his mother had returned to his condo when he saw his first victim of the disease.

At the airport, Rieux’s mother waited for him at the arrivals area, her Burberry jacket, handed down from her daughter, folded over her arm. He apologized for being late, but she had just come through the exit after waiting for a half hour for her bag to arrive on the conveyor belt. She only had her carry-on. “I got dizzy looking for it,” she said. “Please, Son, will you help me speak to the airline?”

The man behind the desk at the counter said that all the luggage had been unloaded and claimed. “It’s possible that the bag has been stolen,” he told them. “It happens rarely. Do you have insurance?”

Mrs Rieux looked at her son in dismay and tugged the sleeve of his fleece jacket. It saddened him that his mother, once a woman who instilled fear among landlords, bureaucrats, and plumbers—as fearless as she was obsequious to her employers and the relatives who gave her money for her children’s school expenses and tuition—now seemed so small and looked to him to make things better. Dr Rieux puffed out his chest and told him that airport security needed improvement. He gave the man his address and contact information should the luggage turn up.

“You’ve aged,” she told him when they were in the cab. “That’s good. Your patients will take you more seriously. That’s not a bad thing. You look more like your father every day.”

Rieux’s father was only a half decade older than he was now—thirty-six—when he had been killed in a car crash. Rieux was five when his father died, old enough to have memories of him, though few remained—the sense of his father’s moustache across his cheek was one of them. His father had been a doctor too, although Rieux had made no effort to emulate him. He’d passed on to his only son his hair, his slight stature, and according to Mrs Rieux, his taste for argument.

Mrs Rieux herself was a devout Catholic who believed in reincarnation. She saw joy in patterns and was the kind of person who, while eating a meal, was reminded of some place she’d visited as a child and would tell you all about it. She sometimes believed that the strangers she spoke to were dead relatives reborn. As she grew older, she became even more fanciful.

“Elyse sends her regards,” Rieux offered.

“It makes me so sad for you two.” She dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “When I look at her Facebook profile and see her most recent shots, it’s like a light being dimmed.”

“She’s optimistic about this … treatment,” he said. “What’s important is that she remains positive.”

“Have you eaten?” she asked.

He’d conscientiously avoided dinner. Mrs Rieux would cook and clean while she was here. In Hong Kong, she was waited on by a Filipina helper hired by his older sister. When they arrived at his house, Mrs Rieux swept immediately into the kitchen before she even washed her face and wrapped an apron around her waist. Rieux set her jacket and handbag on the bed in the spare room where he would have taken her suitcase. It was the better room, with a mountain view, the one they had set aside for a nursery.

The phone rang. It was the seldom-used land line, a number called only by telemarketers and the woman who was now in the kitchen. “I am fine, Dr Rieux,” a voice announced.

“Mr Santos?” Rieux asked.

“Do not worry about me,” Mr Santos said. His breathing was heavy. “My wife worries too much.”

“Are you not feeling well?”

The sound of coughing filled Rieux’s ear. “Mrs Rieux looked very good today,” Mr Santos said once he’d cleared his throat. “Is she going on a vacation?”

“She’s in Mexico until the New Year.”

“An extended holiday. How nice! It’s too bad doctors have such busy schedules.”

“Indeed.”

“As you can tell, I’m feeling better as I speak. I won’t take too much of your time. Enjoy your evening.”

As Rieux puzzled over this phone call, Mrs Rieux prepared macaroni in broth with shredded ham and peas—a Chinese diner specialty. Her preference would have been to make a proper Cantonese meal, but first she would have to shop. She asked her son for bus directions to the nearest Chinese grocer. He worried that she’d have too much to carry and said they could go together.

She threw a hand against her forehead. “I forgot that I packed sausage in my luggage,” she told him in Cantonese.

“We have that here,” he answered in English. “You’ll see when we get to the store. We can pick up some items—clothes, toiletries—tomorrow morning. It won’t be long before your luggage is retrieved.”

“You’re already too busy. I’m here to help you.”

“It’s no trouble,” he lied.

This was the extent of their conversation. As it had been in his youth, the meal was so devoid of chatter that every slurp and clink of spoons against bowls seemed to form its own language. At least in his youth his mother could ask him and his sister about schoolwork. This was the first time she’d seen him in a year and she would be here at least until January. Unless he insisted, she would not go sightseeing—she had lived here for twenty-five years, anyhow—or visit with her remaining friends. She would watch her Chinese TV shows through an elaborate black box whose installation Rieux had arranged last week. They would eat together, silently, and this would be the extent of their time together.