“I did look it up, your worship,” Siddhu said. “It happens relatively often between adoptees who meet their birth parents as adults or siblings who were separated at birth. There was even a radio documentary—”
“I broke my family’s trust. And I hurt Cassidy’s feelings by treating her like someone who needed to remain hidden. I could have avoided much of this hurt.” He paused. “But I don’t know how I could have avoided the act itself. I wasn’t ready for it. And I wouldn’t have acted on it, if we both weren’t feeling such … things. I never drank excessively or did drugs, but I know people who have struggled with addiction. And what I felt when I saw her for the first time sounded like what they’ve experienced—a feeling of peace followed by intense panic.”
Siddhu wanted to let Parsons unburden himself before he asked for details, a step-by-step recounting of the choices he’d made. The public had already received Cassidy’s account of their night together, spent ordering room service and drinking minibar vodka tonics until she felt so dizzy that she could’ve been tipped over “with a feather.” Parsons, thought Siddhu, was a man who could not reconcile personal misfortune in his life, who knew suffering only externally. He would want to minimize this discussion, present it as something that overtook him, before pivoting into his vision of a more equitable city after the infection.
As Parsons gave his responses, his features regained their distinct bearing, and he became animated. Heads started to turn. People were preparing for selfies with him.
“Are you still in contact with Cassidy?” Siddhu asked.
The mayor shook his head. “Why does this matter when people are dying?”
“Do you wish you were?” Siddhu asked.
The question made Parsons fold inwards. He bounced over his sentences, struggling to find enough words needed to bury a lie—an ossuary of rhetoric. Siddhu hated having to ask Parsons how he met cute with his adult child. He wanted to wash his tongue in hand sanitizer, but if he didn’t, someone else would ask Parsons the same rude question. Siddhu had no choice. He needed to earn the life insurance policy purchased for him. He pushed the phone closer toward Parsons and asked him about the events that took place months earlier, when people had the time to commit errors. “Don’t spare any details,” he added.
The interview appeared later that day on GSSP and was widely re-posted, but it achieved the opposite effect to what Parsons had intended. The mayor sounded defensive, annoyed that the public was so interested in his personal life. He implied that Vancouverites took pleasure in his fall because it was a distraction. By contrast, the public felt that Parsons’ desire to return to the policy fight against the disease and the underlying inequities it revealed was merely the smokescreen for his personal failures.
14.
Rieux rearranged his schedule at the clinic to allow for night and weekend shifts at the auxiliary hospital. On days when he would have ordinarily slid into spandex to ride to Squamish and back, he donned pea-green hospital scrubs and booties.
The rate of infection had not abated. The patients came from throughout the city like random jury-pool selections. The poor and the elderly who arrived were admitted with more advanced symptoms. Only a fraction of the patients he saw—between a quarter and a third, by Rieux’s count—responded to antibiotics. Castello told him that a vaccine was currently being tested on macaque monkeys at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.
He spent most of his shifts watching people die. He had seen deaths during his residency and on his shifts at the lung clinic, but not in this volume, not with this frequency. These patients looked like nothing he’d ever seen before, yet they sparked recognition within him. It took him into his second day, while sitting in front of his laptop, to find the faces he’d been looking at in Medieval paintings.
Where he worked, no saints interceded from the heavens, no demons pulled his patients by their respirator tubes and IV lines into the netherworld. But those Old Masters were not working entirely in the realm of symbolism. In the sixty-year-old man whose body in repose was polka-dotted in buboes, whose face showed agony blanched in listlessness, Rieux recognized a model for a sixteenth-century woodcut. An orderly turning over a patient, his broad shoulders twisting through his hospital gown, shared the musculature of a worker hauling a plague victim into a wagon in a famous etching.
Rieux saw himself in those paintings too. Haughty and slight, wearing his gown and mask—preserving his own health without saving others—he felt estranged from his own silhouette. He saw illustrations of plague doctors as crow-like bird men wearing black wide-brimmed hats and ankle-length gowns and wondered whether Medieval painters hadn’t cryptically represented the unease of the doctors. In the artist’s eye, the doctor was no saviour but a scavenger who descended on a field of death and snatched the least doomed specimens for profit. The plague doctors of the sixteenth century wore masks that resembled bird’s heads with glass eyeholes and curved beaks stuffed with aromatics like mint and camphor to ward off disease, because before germ theory was introduced, disease had been thought to spread through odours. Plague doctors held staffs so they could point at infection without touching it.
In the end, it was not the images of dying people that made him restless but their cries for help. Some of them asked for things in languages he didn’t understand. They moaned, wailed, and sobbed. He heard them all through his mask, the sounds made distant, like reverberations in a seashell. There was no escape to outside. Others withdrew. They sought private oases. But when Rieux turned inward, he saw his wife’s face. He felt a steady pulse behind his eyes, an alarm. It reminded him that he was letting everyone down.
When he wasn’t at the hospital, he wanted to find other ways to work. He had contacted Tso about starting a group that could offer sanitation classes and support to areas that had been infected at higher-than-average rates. As more fell ill, mistrust of the medical system had grown to the point that people preferred to suffer untreated at home with their families than to be treated at the auxiliary hospital where they would risk dying surrounded by strangers in masks. As a result, he continued to make house calls.
“Aren’t public health organizations already offering clinics and handing out sanitizer and masks?” Tso asked while they were having dinner at his condo. Mrs Rieux had made curried beef brisket for dinner when her son told her he’d invited a guest.
“There’s too much mistrust of doctors,” Rieux said. “As far as some people are concerned, we are putting disease into them.”
The planning session alarmed Mrs Rieux. She had grown worried about her son’s workload. As a teenager, she told Tso, he had been admitted to the hospital with ulcers. He didn’t tell anyone that he’d been shitting blood because he didn’t want to fall behind in classes. He didn’t know when to stop.
“This is not dinner table conversation, Mom,” Rieux told her.
At least she was sitting at the table, if on the edge of her seat. For most of the evening, she had been in the kitchen cooking or bringing dishes to them in the dining area. Rieux felt compelled to mention to Tso that Mrs Rieux was his mother, and that she was visiting—she was not his servant.
“He once passed out during a math exam,” Mrs Rieux told Tso. She spoke English at the beginning of the night but had turned to Cantonese. “In the hospital, he made me bring schoolwork to him.”