“Isn’t this a distraction?” Tso asked her.
Grossman swore it wasn’t. “I’m helping other people. I’m spending time with a friend.”
Until she could collect her windfall, she lived off her credit card and devoted herself to a variety of creative projects. She had plans to turn her former lover’s studio into a performance space. She worked on a novel but got stuck on revising the first sentence: “For seven centuries, the rival clans of Mok-Tah fought until the cloudy day Princess Destiny emerged from a dragon-drawn carriage and announced that she would offer herself as the bride to the person or spirit who would join the warring factions.”
“The first sentence needs to be perfect,” Grossman insisted soon after she’d made her comment about self-sabotage. “But all that sitting has been murder on my back. Delivering meals is the perfect task. I need something to get my blood circulating.”
They expected their first few days to be slow, but response to the posters continued to be sluggish even weeks later. Rieux felt that they needed more volunteers and wanted to help more people. It came as no surprise to Tso that he had studied Utilitarianism in high school and read about the lives of people who saw charity in the starkest, most actuarial terms. “Most Utilitarians gave up their own happiness for the sake of others. I think I could do that,” Rieux said. “What I can’t stomach is how they put strangers ahead of their own loved ones. A Utilitarian would donate their kidney to give a stranger twenty years of extra life over their own mother, if it only gave her another five years. That always struck me as a pathology.”
Tso was given the task of recruiting Raymond Siddhu to report on their activities. She joined him in the hotel bar. The hulking reporter was unusually morose and ordered four rye and sodas that evening. (Rye was the only liquor the bar was serving that week.) It was his twin sons’ first birthday, but the weak hotel wi-fi signal failed before he could watch them blow out birthday candles on his phone.
“I don’t see an end to this,” Siddhu complained tearily. Christmas was soon approaching. Moreover, his wife had stopped using antidepressants. She said her mood had picked up from regular workouts. Now she hardly had time to talk with him, and the kids were left to family while she went to the gym.
He also found his workplace challenging, with a puzzling boss more preoccupied with digital security than news. The promise of an ownership stake had also not come up again.
“If he doesn’t give you any direction, why don’t you write about the Sanitation League?” she asked him.
“It’ll get buried.”
“Not if you write it well.”
He rolled his eyes. “Couldn’t you just make a better poster?”
“Touché.” They clinked their glasses. Unlike Rieux, Siddhu teased back. He agreed to ride along with her and Grossman the next day.
When she returned to her room that night, she found a bouquet of white anemones on her desk. There was no card. At first, she assumed they had been ordered by Rieux, who was formal enough to send bouquets. Had she told him about her favourite flowers? How would he have the wherewithal to get anemones (a luxury good that would have to be smuggled into the city)? As someone who read widely, he might have known that anemones were once used by European peasants to ward off disease and bad luck. She would text him about the flowers tomorrow; for now, she was too tired to think.
Siddhu was waiting for her by the elevators when she left her room the next morning, playing with his yo-yo. She’d thought his public displays of yo-yo-ing were ploys for attention, but he seemed too engrossed in his activity to engage in conversations during his tricks and too psychically displaced by them to talk much afterward. She decided that he yo-yoed as a social crutch, the way others looked at their smartphones.
At the hotel lobby, the front desk clerk waved at her. “Did you like your gift?” the clerk asked.
Tso nodded. “Who sent it?”
“He said it was from a secret admirer.” She added that the person who brought the flowers to the front desk did not look like he worked for a florist. “Not a bad-looking guy, by the way.”
Now it struck her as odd that Rieux would describe himself as a secret admirer. As Siddhu waited for her outside, she sent Rieux a text about the flowers.
Siddhu and Tso caught the bus to Grossman’s house. In her kitchen, they made a dozen brown bag lunches for people who called the Sanitation League for regular meal delivery. Each lunch contained two turkey and cheese sandwiches, a fruit cup, Oreo cookies, and milk. They climbed into Grossman’s car to drop off their meals. They visited old Asian ladies in crumbling bungalows, single men living in rooming houses, and the swanky condo of a young lawyer who could barely open the door. It made no sense to help the lawyer, but Rieux insisted that their job was “not to rank the people on a scale of suffering based on our assumptions.” Tso disagreed, and they had one of their ongoing debates about privilege and equality.
Each delivery had allowed the Sanitation League a pretense to check on the client. Many were healthy but frightened to leave their houses. Others lived with people who had been admitted to one of the hospitals. Some felt unwell but had symptoms inconsistent with the bubonic and pneumonic forms of the disease. If Rieux was paying a house call, he would also administer a take-away test for the disease. Even when the results appeared positive, clients were reluctant to call an ambulance. Many preferred to die at home than find themselves alone in a hospital with a faint chance of survival.
Around lunch time, Rieux texted back to say that he knew nothing about flowers. Her hand tightened around the phone.
Siddhu monitored their home visits with a skeptical eye. He entered other’s places of residence with mask and gloves and tried to touch as little as possible. “You’ve spent four hours visiting half a dozen people,” he told Tso. “This isn’t very efficient. And I mean that as an observation more than as criticism. What are you going to do when more people call your hotline?”
“There are still more healthy folks than sick ones,” Tso replied. “I believe there are enough good eggs out there—who can accept some risk, who want to do something—to take care of the ones who don’t have anyone else.”
“Besides, it’s Christmastime,” Grossman added. “I don’t even celebrate the holiday, but charity is already baked into the calendar.”
“Why do you want to help people?” Siddhu asked.
“I’ve tried sitting around, trying not to get infected—and I was suffocating,” Tso said. “It’s about fulfilling our purpose as social animals. It’s like your situation. Look at it: You were doing fine when you were telling the world about what was happening inside the quarantine zone because it served the community. It was only when you were forced to muckrake—to cover the mayor’s personal scandal—that you became overwhelmed.”
“That’s not the whole story,” Siddhu insisted.