“Are you picky about red wine?” Tso asked Rieux. He shook his head. She looked relieved. Tso picked one of the remaining wines and the waitress took their menus.
“Do you come to Vancouver often?” he asked her. “How do you know everyone?”
She told him it was only her second visit to the city. “I don’t know anyone here. I met Janice when I arrived a month ago. She’s become my Vancouver sister—or daughter. And the waitress, I met her the other day—it’s a long story. She didn’t even tell me she worked here.” The server brought a half-carafe of wine and two glasses. Tso poured. “It’s actually easy to make friends. We’re all going through something momentous and unique. I have no one here who I know well, who understands. I’ve chatted with my aunt and my friends back home, but it’s stilted. They don’t know what’s going on in this place, and I can’t describe it to them.”
“It’s easy to make friends when strangers want to talk to you,” he told her. He regretted that his statement sounded like an accusation. He was tired and would have blown off Tso’s request if it had come from anyone else, but her charisma compelled him, in part, because it was the inverse of his. Even as a child, he couldn’t make friends, and in university did his lab projects un-partnered. He compensated by joining clubs and playing team sports. He became a general practitioner, not a researcher—a better fit for his solitary temperament and idealism—so he could have the chance to speak to people. “It’s a talent I don’t have,” he admitted.
“It can be a curse,” she told him. “You’re always promising people—without even promising them—more than you can deliver.” She made so much eye contact, it felt like she was showing off.
“But people beg me to make promises—to predict outcomes, to give assurances,” he said, turning to his glass. He downed the wine in a gulp. “At least that’s how it is in my line of work.”
“Are you worried you’ll get sick?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I take every precaution. If I get sick, it will be because I am doing my work.” Her attention drifted to the candle between them, which allowed him to continue thinking through her question. “I see patients, good people who have led healthy lives, fall ill for no reason other than genetics or bad luck. Dropping dead during this quarantine would at least serve some purpose.”
“I’m not worried about dying. I wrote a book about it—”
“I haven’t read it. Sorry.”
“I’m not book-shaming you. The gist of the book was, dying gives life meaning. We clear space and feed the earth when we pass on.”
“That’s common sense,” he blurted out, then realized how rude he sounded. “Sorry, that didn’t—”
“The wine’s really gotten to your head,” she told him, pouring the rest of the carafe into his glass. “Yes, you’re right, the book doesn’t reshape the history of thought. But what I was trying to do was shift, in a small way, our collective mindsets. I told readers to start planning their funerals in their thirties, not when they’re in their eighties and on their deathbeds. I wanted them to think about the people they leave behind—family, friends—as a gift.”
“So you’re in good shape for this epidemic?” he asked her.
“No way. Death I can handle, but being sick frightens me. Not having family or anyone who knows me well enough to call a good friend, should I fall mortally ill, scares me. I figure Janice is my only lifeline.”
When they’d finished their wine, Rieux paid the bill, despite Tso’s protest, and then waited with her until she got into a cab. He didn’t remember his walk home but woke up in bed with his hiking boots on. He clomped into the bathroom and vomited. In a panic, he took his own temperature and concluded he was only hungover (without having had much to drink). Remorse washed over him, a feeling that exceeded anything he did or admitted to feeling. In the churning of regret, he was possessed by a need to speak to Elyse. He tried the number she’d given him, but the call didn’t go through because he hadn’t used the proper country code. When he got a recorded message asking him to try again, he didn’t bother to search for the correct number. Instead he dialled the clinic and told the receptionist he was feeling unwell.
Rieux left the house to sidestep his concerned mother. He took his bike out but was forced to choose the roads carefully. A patch of black ice would further strain the medical system. He stopped on Broadway to chug a bottle of water and find something to eat. His ambitions that day were to expend some physical energy. He hoped to ride to the university and back. While in line for his bagel, he received a text from Castello. She wanted to see him at the hospital. “I’m calling in a favour,” she wrote. “Actually, I am calling in two.”
They had not spoken since her tirade of frantic messages. Rieux replied that he was on his way. The day had opened up like one extended airport layover as soon as he called in sick, so he was relieved by Castello’s invitation. He biked along the Seawall, a ride made easier by the absence of tourists, enjoying the burn of the frosty air on his cheeks.
Castello waited outside the doors of the auxiliary hospital—a wing of the unfinished medical centre that would replace St. Paul’s Hospital the next year—reserved for patients with the disease. She had a new blunter hairstyle and was wearing makeup. She swiped Rieux in and led him to a room where they both changed into protective clothing. “We are short-staffed in the auxiliary hospital,” she told him. “You used to work a day a week in the lung clinic. I was wondering whether I could convince you to work here for a couple of shifts.”
She knew he would be curious. And she knew that he never declined her requests. “Someone I know was admitted yesterday,” he told her. “May I visit him?”
Castello pointed at a nurse behind the desk who asked for the patient’s name. “His last name is Grossman,” he told her. “I don’t know his first name. He would be in his sixties. He was admitted last night.”
The nurse turned to her screen and leaned into it. “There was an Isaac Grossman who passed away last night, two hours after he was admitted. But he was eighty-five years old.”
Perhaps he was young-looking for his age, thought Rieux. It seemed unlikely that two people with that name would come in at the same time. His bloody coughing was, in retrospect, a terminal event, a flag of surrender from betrayed lungs.
“Sorry,” Castello said. “Come with me. You should take a look at what we have here.”
There was a range of suffering here, from those moaning listlessly in agony—fresh admittees—to those who looked content in their disease-racked repose. Castello and Rieux visited the bed of a fifty-one-year-old man who had been one of the first people admitted for the bubonic version of the disease. Within the first day, he had developed disseminated intravascular coagulation—a clotting of the blood followed by organ failure—and was placed in an induced coma. His legs became gangrenous and needed to be amputated.
“He woke up for the first time yesterday and asked the nurse to scratch his toes,” Castello said, her dry laugh like a snare beat.