By nightfall, Grossman and Tso had put together the pine casket. The website suggested that it could also be used as a stage or Halloween prop. When they were done, they had realized that promise. It looked like something without being that something. Grossman sobbed at the result. “We’ll figure out an alternative,” Tso told her. She led her upstairs and back to sleep.
That evening, Tso allowed Grossman to spoon her until she began to snore. Once she detached herself, she stepped out of the apartment, across the landing, and knocked on Farhad Khan’s door.
“Ah—my saviour!” Khan shouted. He was bare-chested, in a pair of running shorts. “Please, come in.”
The front hallway to the apartment was lined with liquor boxes and cartons of cigarettes. Tso walked by the kitchenette where she had found him after his suicide attempt. The upturned chair remained on the checkerboard floor. “You seem to have some new business concerns,” she said.
“Yeah, I have some friends who fix me up,” he said, flopping into the middle of a couch. She couldn’t help noticing that he had the torso of a swimmer: a tanned, hairless inverted triangle. The torsos she’d seen most recently had all been narrow, wiry, and tattooed. Between the couch and a large television playing cable news, she saw a hookah. “You smoke?” he asked.
“Not in a long time,” she said, remembering a trip to Istanbul as a backpacker. She sat across from him in a matching armchair that she didn’t remember from her last visit. He huffed the hookah pipe, blowing smoke that made his eyes water, and passed it to her.
The water at the bottom of the blue-glass basin bubbled. She held up her hands, staring at the mouthpiece as if it were the barrel of a pistol. “We’ve got to be careful about infection these days.”
He broke out in laughter. His eyes were red and glassy as he took another puff. “Okay, maybe you are right,” he said. “But look at Mr Izzy—such a careful man. So proper, so clean. He doesn’t want to be around no one. Not even his nice daughter. And he dies. So if I die, I should die with others.”
Tso decided she would get to the point. “You said you could help. By that you mean you can get goods through the barricades?”
“Before I got depressed, I used to sell and re-sell. Long time ago, it used to be bad things. It was bad, not so bad.” He leaned back into the couch. “The kind of things kids get in trouble selling. When this sickness happened, it was like a wake-up call. I need to get back to business. I need to make money. I need to love life.” He pointed his pinched fingertips in the air in emphasis and took another hookah hit to settle himself. “Let us … jump chase. It’s easier to bring things into the city, but I can also take things out.”
“You mean like mail?” Tso asked, knowing immediately she’d missed the mark.
He dipped his nose and looked at her with incredulity. “I am saying I can get you out. Isn’t that what you want? I won’t take money from you, but my associates will charge a fee. It won’t be cheap.”
She shook her head. “No. What I need is a coffin for Mr Grossman.”
He laughed again. “Ah, that is easy. I get you one by tomorrow—the day after, at the latest.”
When the coffin arrived the next day, Khan waved off any attempts to pay him. “Maybe I ask for a favour back,” he told Tso. “Like in The Godfather.”
Three days had passed, and Tso left Grossman’s house knowing that she had done as much as she could for her friend. At the funeral, so many people came to pay their respects to Izzy Grossman that the small room was quickly filled. Latecomers listened to Janice Grossman’s eulogy, which was funny enough to earn a standing ovation, from the hallway.
Within two months of the quarantine, when weekly deaths peaked at two hundred and twelve, the scarcity of burial space in Vancouver would become an issue that distracted people with righteous anger. The city crematorium operated seven days a week. City land earmarked for a playground was used for those who needed urgent burial for their loved ones, but even then, bodies and remains were stacked on top of one another. If only Grossman knew this at the time, Tso thought. Her father hadn’t really gone too early. He was first in line.
13.
In the first hours of the quarantine, a few Vancouverites managed to sidestep the Canadian Armed Forces roadblocks. Before additional Coast Guard patrol boats arrived, they took their private sea vehicles from the Burrard Marina to Richmond or Deep Cove. Others slipped through the wooded pathways of Central Park, carrying their essential belongings in backpacks and rolling luggage to get to Burnaby and beyond. Siddhu had heard stories of semi-organized gangs of twenty or more darting across Boundary Road in a stampede, knowing that the soldiers couldn’t catch them all. The soldiers had not yet been instructed to use force, the outer limits of which had still not been established, to contain them. In the early days, the spotlights that rimmed the city borders like neon beams had yet to be installed. The barbed wire had yet to be unfurled. The sentry towers would take another week to be built.
The first escapees evaded not only confinement but that sense of unreality that choked so many Vancouverites, that made them long for two-zone bus passes and suburban cul-de-sacs. Envy always overcame locals in between moments of panic and fear.
Siddhu pondered the escapees the way he might look at a friend who bought a stock that skyrocketed. It didn’t help that his wife regaled him with these success stories in their nightly Skype chats. By then, she knew that he had quit his job at the paper. She looked increasingly pale, her eyes puffier, as she spoke from their brightly lit kitchen, the pile of dishes overgrown in the sink. The boys would still be whimpering out their last waking moments from upstairs when she called. He wouldn’t be able to hear them, but she would turn her head and shush them.
Uma needed him to bear witness to her account of the day before she got too tired. People came to help: her mother (whose flight back from Chandigarh had been rerouted to Seattle), his mother, and Uma’s sisters and friends. They watched the boys and brought food, so she could get a massage or sit through a movie. “But then, they always leave,” she said. “Sometimes they go before I want them to, and sometimes they can’t go soon enough.” He knew she was talking about his mother. “What I’m left to do—it’s too much. I don’t blame you. Not when I think about it. But I need to be angry.”
In their relationship, he was the one who cried, the one who needed to be calmed down. Now, he held back his own tears as she worked through her displeasure. Afterward she would apologize through her sobs, and he would tell her to get some sleep. The worst way to end a call was when one of the boys started to scream. He would see her leave the kitchen and stare at the video image of his refrigerator for minutes, unsure of her return, before finally ending their call.