Rieux had not heard his wife’s voice in more than two weeks, when she’d left a voicemail. It had been a month since they’d actually spoken. Elyse had then seemed concerned about Rieux, but she also sounded distracted, perhaps drugged. She now sounded certain about the decisions she had made and would make in the future.
“I miss you now,” she said. “I never understood people who go on about missing the people they’re leaving the minute they step out the door. I used to text ‘I miss you already’ when I went on a business trip. I was lying. It should take time to miss people. It took me a little longer than I wanted.”
“I feel that way, too,” he confessed. “I didn’t miss you at all. I got caught up with everything.”
Elyse could hear Siddhu laughing in the background and Grossman and Tso’s voices. Rieux told her who they were and remembered that she didn’t know them.
He could have said that he felt guilty, as well, for having forgotten about her for days at a time. For entertaining the idea that her passing in Mexico might make it easier for him to grieve. For thinking of her already in the past tense. For ignoring her system of organizing paper and plastic recycling. For putting her toiletries in a box and placing it in her closet. For thinking of her as a character in a movie he once loved. And for other things he couldn’t yet admit to himself.
They stayed on the phone together for a few more minutes but exchanged barely any words. It had been a long time since they’d been silent together. There had been fraught silences, but this was one of their sweet silences. Their wordless conversation felt choreographed, as though they were both following a musical score, waiting for their extended rest to break before they offered their final holiday salutations and returned to their Christmas dinners.
“Are you there?” Tso asked after Rieux returned to his place at the table. She was seated next to him.
“Sorry—what?” he asked.
“I asked you whether you wanted a fish ball.”
He smiled. “Always.”
By the New Year, the Sanitation League had grown to encompass a team of two dozen volunteers, including a few doctors and nurses who admired (and were amused by) Rieux. Our story’s nominal protagonist had hoped it would become a city-wide effort spanning age, ethnicity, and income but tried not to reveal his disappointment at its actual scale. Tso would have teased him for wanting to become a disease “disruptor.” This was not true. He only wanted to help as many people as possible. It did, however, bother him. He’d thought the League was a good idea.
Befitting their name, the Sanitation League also cleaned houses. Rieux often delegated this non-urgent task to others. On the first day of the New Year, a request to clean was called in and no one else on the team was available. When Mrs Rieux saw her son with a mop and bucket and learned of his task, she volunteered her services.
“You did this for thirty years,” Rieux said, waving her aside. “You’ve earned your rest.”
She flung her hand in the air. “Don’t waste thirty years of experience!”
“What if you get sick?” Rieux replied. “I would never forgive myself.”
Her nose wrinkled so far back into her face that Rieux could see the grey hairs in her nostrils. “I have lived long enough—I feel like I’m already living my second life,” she told him. “Don’t act as though you are ashamed of me or what I did to feed you and your sister.”
She didn’t give him a choice. He relented. She giggled as she put on her jacket and slipped on her face mask. “I let you sit in a chair and read when you were a boy. But now you will scrub with me.”
They boarded a van that Rieux had rented, filled with biohazard cleaning materials. Mrs Rieux held her phone in her lap, listening to Cantonese opera as they drove.
They turned up at a rooming house five blocks from Rieux’s clinic. A familiar face opened the door: Rieux’s favourite patient, Walter. He had called in with a pseudonym: Willy Love. He was dressed in a white sleeveless undershirt, a black baseball cap, and cut-off denim jeans. He was barefoot.
“Welcome, welcome!” he said.
“Happy New Year, Walter.”
Walter had an attic space in the rooming house. Mrs Rieux pulled the mop and pail out of her son’s hands and started right away in the bathroom. “This is going to take a while,” she said in a voice that was not displeased. Despite her threats, she seemed content to clean alone.
Walter asked Rieux if he wanted tea. Rieux declined, leaving him to make his own cup. Rieux’s patient invited him to sit in his bedroom, which was up a set of stairs. The room was filled with clay sculpture, abstract figures in the shape of bonsai trees but with the texture of sea foam and human musculature. A single bed was pushed up against a wall on which Walter had taped some faded photos. There was only one chair, so Walter sat on his bed. The room itself was too sparsely furnished to be messy, but it did have a smell.
“Everyone else is gone,” Walter announced. “They’ve all died.”
The landlady who lived downstairs had fallen ill first; her son started to collect the rent. Then two other longtime tenants were taken away last week. Neither of them returned. In a less dire situation, Rieux would have evacuated him, but there was no place to send Walter. The city had had a vacancy problem before this all started.
Rieux could hear his mother singing Cantonese opera from the bathroom downstairs. Her voice echoed from the empty tub.
“Why haven’t you come by the clinic these last couple of months?” Rieux asked. “I used to see you all the time.”
“You would never tell me I was sick,” he said, “so I went to other doctors. They didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear either.” As he spoke, he reclined until he was flat on the bed. He traced the edges of the faded photos taped to the wall. “Now it’s just me, and I need to stay here alone, remembering everyone.”
There were red marks on his arms and feet, possibly from bed bugs. They, like Walter, were indestructible. Rieux would call the landlady’s son to ask him to get an exterminator to the property. Walter caught him looking at the red marks. He pointed to a figure in one of his faded pictures.
“This old friend taught me how to tattoo with ink and a sewing needle, and for a while I would give tattoos to lovers and acquaintances. I got pretty good, but I never experimented on myself. I was terrified of needles. And I loved the body God gave me.”
“What changed?” Rieux asked. “Was it the disease? The quarantine?”
He nodded. “It felt like old times. I was watching people around me dying—again. These were the people who did nothing wrong the first time. Everyone just stood by. Doctors just like you.” He sat up. “Do you know what time it is?”
Before Rieux could answer, Walter said that he’d stopped counting the days. “I can’t tell you when, exactly, but I became so sad that I couldn’t bear time passing,” he continued. “I saw the Christmas trees, but I don’t know what day of the month it is unless someone makes me sign a cheque or wishes me a happy new year. My assistance payments come electronically.”
The day the barricades went up, Walter continued, he thought about his old friends again. He remembered, in particular, the friend who taught him how to tattoo. This friend had thrown himself in front of a train.
Rieux stared at Walter’s relatively unblemished body and thought that it didn’t look the way the body of someone who suffered from serious illness might look.
“I got out a sewing needle. I only had red ink. And I marked myself. The day after that I marked myself again. Now I use it to keep track of the days we have been locked up together. If I want to know how long everyone has been suffering the way I have, I just need to roll up my sleeve.”