Siddhu decided not to correct him about what “off the record” meant. He let the officer disparage the work of the coast guard until a truck approached the gate. It had been emptied of its cargo. The driver rolled down the window and presented him with a security card, which the army captain swiped through a tablet encased in a bulky military-looking shell and had a reader attached to it. The inspection process took nearly a quarter of an hour, as the line behind the truck grew. Drivers, by law, were not allowed to step out of their vehicles. Most of them carried piss bottles because they couldn’t use the washroom. Soldiers with dogs boarded the cargo holds while others in gas masks fumigated the trucks’ exteriors.
Over a period of three hours, dozens of trucks came in and out. Siddhu chatted with the army captain, who was amiable, and enjoyed his company. When he felt comfortable enough, Siddhu asked him about rumours made about compassionate “exceptions.” The soldier’s expression remained fixed as though he hadn’t heard.
“There are stories in the ether about people who have been let out of the city because there’s a relative in another city who’s dying,” Siddhu added. “I’ve heard people talking about diplomats who succeeded in getting citizens of their countries airlifted back to their home nations, where they are isolated for a period of time and released. Do you know anything about this?”
The captain’s tone became much more officious, even stilted. “The only people who have been in and of the city, as far as I know, have been truck drivers or infectious disease experts,” he said. “I get asked that question a lot.”
“My family is in the suburbs,” Siddhu explained. “I’ve been living in a hotel. My boys are a year old.”
“If you’re going to escape,” he told him without making eye contact, “the best way would be to go by boat. Find someone who knows what they’re doing, someone who has a licensed driver. Now, that’s off the record, too.”
From their elevated perch, they both looked out onto the highway at the commuter traffic that bypassed the city. Siddhu used to hate traffic. But now he saw the beauty—the order and purpose—in the car lights on the highway. He saw minivans in the High Occupancy Vehicle lane and imagined families returning from a visit to grandparents. In other cars, he pictured lonesome fathers getting home as their kids were being sent to bed.
The trucks came steadily as they watched from the tower. Near the end of Siddhu’s evening, a drone appeared in the sky. It was so small at first that the army captain needed to point it out. “We get one every night,” he told Siddhu, passing the binoculars. This drone was white with four propellers and a camera on its base. “It’s either a single asshole or a bunch of them who think they were the first ones to come up with this idea.”
For weeks, people on social media had posted about hearing gunshots at night, but the city denied that any violence had occurred, and no one had mentioned anything about drones. But at the hotel’s restaurant a man had been pointed out to Siddhu. He was a permanent resident who used to pilot a drone above crowds of tourists on the beach from a secluded grassy area. The drone, it was said, would drop a water balloon filled with this man’s urine, but he had never been caught. Since the quarantine, there were no tourists and few people on the beach. At the restaurant, Siddhu saw the man most mornings, reading over the newspaper contentedly with his toast and coffee.
The army captain came down from the guard tower with a rifle. He knelt, lined up the drone in his scope, and waited a moment in the hope that the drone might turn back before he pulled the trigger. The crack startled Siddhu.
Siddhu grew up in a house with an above-ground swimming pool. His parents had two additional properties that they either rented at a discount to extended family or left sitting empty. His mother drove only German cars. His parents spoke of deprivation in their childhoods: too many family members, too little space, bill collectors that had to be evaded. As a young man, he believed that he was fortunate, anointed by fate to live on the crest of his family’s rising fortunes.
In his adult life, Siddhu revised that estimate. He saw wealthy foreigners arrive, setting up their children with sports cars, mansions, and clothing budgets. He had wanted to move into the city (and away from his family), but kept waiting for real estate prices to fall to realistic levels. In his self-pity, he considered himself one of the forsaken. He needed only to do his job to realize how wrong he was. In the city he saw desperation and those who lived in chemically blotted consciousness.
The city’s visible history was characterized by a series of dramatic demographic reversals. Asian people moved into areas previously inhabited by white people. White people moved into places previously inhabited by Asians. Rich people moved into places where poor people lived. Neighbourhoods once avoided had become hotspots for professionals and the creative class. Other homes, once brought to life by families, sat empty as investment properties.
It should not have sounded so unlikely to Siddhu when he first heard reports about needles found in the city’s most prestigious residential neighbourhood, Shaughnessy. He was too distracted to take notice. These tips came the week that he changed jobs. He could not pursue the story for his old paper, and he half-thought the tips would lead to a hoax or a piece of transgressive performance art. But in his first week at GSSP, he heard Horne-Bough mention squatters, dozens of them, in vacant homes and future teardowns.
He spent the Tuesday afternoon walking through Shaughnessy. He scoured Devonshire Park, where needles were allegedly discovered, but found only uncollected dog waste. He knocked on doors, but no one answered.
It was by chance that he saw a man pushing a shopping cart through the gates of a Tudor-style mansion. Its lawn was overgrown and its towering evergreens fenced in orange plastic mesh—a telltale sign of a teardown. Siddhu followed the man up the driveway to an open garage door, where the shopping cart was parked.
He entered the house and walked into the kitchen. There were bottles and lighters and needles on a marble counter-top. Beyond was a carpeted family room in which lawn furniture and the back seat of a car had been set up. Half a dozen men and women in hoodies and baseball caps sat around staring at the unlit fireplace. He did not know these people, but he recognized them. This was the part of the population that many citizens had wished away. They’d gotten their wish; these people were no longer seen—and yet, they were never closer.
Siddhu introduced himself. With glazed expressions, a few called out to him as if he was both welcome and expected. One woman who had been squatting by the fireplace approached him. She had black hair streaked with grey strands cut in a shag and papery skin the colour of burnt sienna. She refused to give Siddhu her name but said that she had lived in the Annex area until water damage from putting out a fire in the storefront next door had prompted her eviction. She’d found this squat at the end of the summer. “There’s nothing special about this situation,” she told him bluntly. “There are other houses like this one. We try not to come in and out during the day. He told us to stay out of the way and that we’d be fine.”
“Who?” Siddhu asked.
She was evasive at first. Siddhu offered her a cigarette from a pack he’d bought in case he needed to ingratiate himself today. She took it and began to tell him about the city inspectors who snooped around the house as her housemates hid in the closets. They were careful to keep the blinds closed.
“One day, he showed up with pizza and bottled water. He wanted to know how we were doing. He said that homes were meant to be lived in.”