Rieux’s mother popped her head into the room. “Finished!” she said. “Would it be alright if I cleaned the kitchen?”
As they waited, Walter asked if he could listen to music. “You can wait with me,” he told Rieux. “But I have talked enough.” He found an AM station that played Top 40 songs. The room was warm, which somehow made Rieux’s eyes burn. In the past few weeks, the doctor had shuffled between various types of fatigue—double-blinking tired, tired in the feet, tired in the shoulders, emotional exhaustion, tired from being around people. On top of this, he experienced a state of being submerged. In this frame of mind, he imagined himself as a sea mammal that could hold his breath indefinitely but became increasingly fixated with that undetermined moment when he would have to break the surface.
In these middle days of the quarantine, any word of stemming the disease was shushed away as false hope. Rieux wanted to be impervious to these vagaries of feeling. If he did all he could, he wouldn’t ever need to regret his decisions.
He could have altered his wife’s prognosis if he had more forcefully urged an aggressive treatment strategy. She had initially chosen to revamp her diet and seek alternative treatments before she visited an oncologist, but he could have overruled her. He pushed away these thoughts by working so hard that sleep, when he gave in to it, obliterated him.
Rieux craved exercise and air. He daydreamed about taking a forest hike. But he was worried about what might come when he stopped working. It could be physical collapse. It could be listlessness. It could be some insight that he was trying to evade.
When Raymond Siddhu came to him with his plan, Rieux did not hesitate. Farhad Khan’s nameless friend might have been in trouble with the law, but he did not deserve to die. Rieux asked Khan to secure antibiotics and ensured that they were administered correctly. He checked on the patient daily. The man’s recovery was atypically prompt. Within a week, he was back on his feet and working again in the smuggling trade.
“Are you lonely, doctor?” Khan asked Rieux after his friend was given his last check-up. Siddhu had accompanied him.
“I have my mother to keep me company,” Rieux said. “Otherwise I’m too busy to feel lonely.”
Khan slapped Rieux’s arm. “No, don’t play stupid with me, okay? I can introduce you to friends of mine. Lovely girls. They have heard about your hero stuff and would like to meet you.”
Rieux shook his head. “I’m married.”
“Let me repay you,” Khan said. His chin kept bobbing as he offered him alcohol, drugs, weapons. He seemed agitated that Rieux acted without need for reciprocation.
“I’m just glad your associate is doing well,” Rieux answered. “But if you want to do anything, you might consider volunteering for the Sanitation League.”
This prompted laughter from Khan. “I’m sorry. I am just too busy.” His attention turned to Siddhu, who seemed on the verge of speaking. “My friend, I have not forgotten you. Are you ready to go home? And when? Tonight?”
Siddhu’s eyes widened. “I might need another day,” he said. “I want to talk to my boss. I should pack.”
It became clear to Rieux that Siddhu had been biding his time. The reporter wanted to know about the type of boat they would use, whether he needed to swim, what he should bring, and the potential risks involved. Siddhu started to mop his brow with a McDonald’s paper napkin. He was so eager that he crowded Khan’s space, forcing him to step back with a nervous smile.
Khan told him that he could not provide the answers yet. He would call tomorrow. “It will be in the middle of the night. Get your rest.”
They were placed in the back of the cube truck again. “By now,” Siddhu said in the dark, “I think I could find the warehouse. I know the turns he takes by heart. He even adds an extra loop in the Best Buy parking lot as misdirection.”
“I’m not positive Khan’s associate was all that sick,” Rieux observed. “If he had what everyone else had, he’d still be recovering. That guy was practically bouncing off the walls.”
“He was probably tired from smuggling,” Siddhu suggested. “Caught the flu. Everybody either under-reacts or over-reacts.”
When the truck’s doors opened again, the sky had already given way to the night’s scowl, even though it was only four o’clock in the afternoon. They were on the street by Rieux’s car, opposite an auto-body shop.
“Do you mind if I drive?” Siddhu asked cheerfully. “It’s been two months.”
Rieux handed him the keys. They sat in the car waiting for the windows to de-fog. Siddhu seemed disfigured by his giddiness. It made Rieux’s skin crawl. And yet he had known about Siddhu’s scheme all along and even sympathized with him. But when he imagined Siddhu on the other side of the gates, he became enraged.
Siddhu drove the car to the Best Buy parking lot. Rieux already knew that the reporter was trying to find Khan’s warehouse. The doctor found Siddhu’s curiosity obnoxious.
“Where do you think the boat leaves from?” Siddhu asked. “All the marinas are under lock and key.”
“I don’t think you should go,” Rieux said. “You’ve been a good addition to our brigade. I would be disappointed in you if you left.”
Siddhu stopped the car. His hands tightened on the steering wheel. “My family needs me.”
“I understand your emotional wants. But people are dying, and we can help them. Escaping would be cowardice.”
Something seemed to back up inside Siddhu’s eyes. Then that thing hurtled up against his face.
“I always thought the Sanitation League was a modest initiative by someone with heroic impulses,” he told Rieux. “And yet we are risking our own lives by going into so many infected homes. You made your volunteers sign waivers. At the end of the day, we could be saving more lives if we all stayed at our sinks washing our hands.”
Rieux did not reply. Siddhu started the car again and turned the radio up loud. “And I know the real reason why you don’t want me to go,” he shouted over the music.
“What’s that?” Rieux asked.
“You need me as a chaperone. You don’t want to be alone with Megan. Because you don’t understand your own emotional wants.”
It took Rieux longer than necessary to absorb his friend’s insinuation. “That’s not true.”
“You can deny it if you like. In any case, you still have your mother and Janice to keep you two apart.”
He blinked twice. He felt both shame and relief. “Does she know?”
Siddhu shook his head. “She’s got other things on her plate.” They stopped outside the city transfer station where garbage normally sat before it was relayed to the landfill in Delta. Presently, excess waste was collecting on a barge in the Fraser River. “I guess Farhad did a better job in hiding his tracks than I thought he did,” he said. He took a breath, then added: “I cheated on my wife before. I don’t recommend it.”
“You did?”
“We had just gotten married at the time, the kids weren’t born yet. But I did. With the woman my parents didn’t want me to marry.”
“Was she non-Indian?” Rieux asked.
Siddhu’s eyelids quivered. “Why does it matter? Just because I’m from an Indian immigrant background doesn’t mean my family is interchangeable with, like, say, the family in a magazine article you read on a plane.”
“I’m sorry.”
“But yes, she was white. And she was older and already had a kid. And she didn’t finish high school. What I’m saying is that there were other things that a non-immigrant, non-Asian family would also object to.”