“I’m sorry.”
“Forget about it. As I was saying, Uma and I were not getting along. She was visiting family in Ontario. It was always easier with this other woman. We fought all the time, but when we fought, everything got said and then it was done. With Uma, an argument from the week before can flitter around you like a swarm of gnats. And so I called this old flame up when her kid was with his dad. I wanted to see what it was like to be with her again. I’d always done the right thing until I didn’t. I remember waking up, going to her bathroom. She had dug up my old toothbrush. I started brushing my teeth. I kept looking at myself and thinking about my toothbrush at home. I thought about how the bed at home was still unmade on one side.”
The last half of Siddhu’s story was told through choked sobs. Rieux was uncomfortable with his friend’s display. He patted him on the arm, but soon found himself pulled into the reporter’s damp embrace.
“I don’t want to leave you all. And part of me is afraid of seeing Uma,” Siddhu admitted. “I feel so bad.”
Rieux felt like a marsupial in his mother’s pouch.
“I do, too,” he said into Siddhu’s chest. “Look, when Elyse got sick, I tried to find the best oncologist and walk her through the stages of treatment. Her friends told me to visit handicraft websites so I could make her an advent calendar she could use to count down her treatments. That’s how hard I tried. I wanted to do all this because I didn’t want to feel what she was feeling. I wanted to help her to ignore her suffering.”
The authors of this account debated the inclusion of this passage. They were mindful of the hurt it might induce. What swayed them was the underlying principles of this story: to describe, honestly and fully, life during this moment in our city’s history. We wanted to show how this calamitous intervention reconfigured our decisions and values. And so any changes in behaviour that arose from our reactions to the disease and the subsequent quarantine were to be included. Even those who never so much as coughed during this period—and that would be the majority of the citizens—felt themselves deformed by the disease.
17.
As the city’s funeral parlour and crematorium staff worked at full capacity, the demand for funeral services prompted them to become creative. Churches offered after-dinner funeral services, for example, and some funeral-home chapels either overlooked the presence of alcohol at their evening services or offered their own cash bars for whatever booze they could find and mark up. Families of the bereaved also utilized unusual venues.
Raymond Siddhu’s experience of the deaths of others felt like a time-delayed bomb. For the first two months, he’d witnessed only the collateral damage wrought by the disease. Since the holidays, there had been funerals galore. The week before, he’d attended three funerals of former co-workers at his old newspaper. All of them were held at the city’s old pressman’s bar. The cartoon renderings of old editors, reporters, and photographers had been taken down years ago when the bar became a live-music venue and then a Belgian beer bar. But the faces—more lined, greying, and voluminous than before—were their own caricatures. There would have been more people at each service-cum-wake, but so many of Siddhu’s former colleagues had already retired to the suburbs or islands.
“I keep expecting him to jump out from behind a curtain and yell surprise!” one ex-journalist, whose cubicle was adjacent to Siddhu in his first two years at the paper, told him.
“The living wake is all the rage these days,” Siddhu observed. “People don’t know when they’re going to go, and they get fed up with hiding at home, so they invite everyone over for drinks.”
“I go out in the evenings more than I have in the past ten years. The city has never been livelier since the night funerals started.”
“That would be a great pull quote,” Siddhu said. “Can I use it?”
“For you, anything,” he said. “But make sure you note that I was on my fourth drink.” The man spilled his rum and Coke as he was caught up in a fit of coughing. Siddhu stepped back and slipped his face mask on. This, like many other things, was no longer considered an impolite gesture.
Siddhu went to bed with a happy buzz. He knew that the next day would be his last in Vancouver. If nothing went wrong. He checked out of his hotel room in the morning, after having packed his Costco clothes in a duffle bag left on his bed with a note saying they could be donated or destroyed.
The call from Khan was to come that night. A more logical person would have waited to check out then and have someplace to rest until leaving in the middle of night. But Siddhu knew he wouldn’t be able to rest. This way, he could depart on a moment’s notice, and he would save money on a day’s accommodation. He needed to start thinking about money again.
The idea of his last breakfast made him nostalgic. Judge Jeffrey Oishi saw him enter the lobby restaurant and invited him over to the table he shared with his daughter Rose, who was colouring a menu in crayon.
“Her school has closed indefinitely after two kids in grade seven got sick,” the judge said. “Her mother and I are trying to make do. You’re acting jumpy. What’s the matter?”
Siddhu leaned across the table and whispered, “I am getting smuggled out of the city.”
Oishi shook his head. “I’ve heard of this scam before. A friend of a friend tried it. He was told to go through a tunnel in the basement of a house near the gates to Burnaby. At the other end, there were soldiers in uniform. This sap paid $20,000. I hope they didn’t soak you for as much.”
“I cashed in my Air Miles,” Siddhu joked. He’d heard the legend of the tunnel too. It sounded like a bad joke from someone who’d binge-watched TV shows about Mexican drug cartels. “Sorry to leave, but the food here is getting to me.”
“I know. You miss your kids.” Oishi tilted his head toward his daughter. “I’m not used to seeing her only half the week. I get up on my mornings without her and panic for a second. I think I lost her. I think she’s under the bed, the way my phone sometimes is.”
Oishi told his daughter to wish Siddhu luck. She was uncommonly beautiful in a way that made Siddhu envy women for their ability to fawn over young children without becoming criminally suspect. This yearning had only come recently. Before his twins were born, babies were as interchangeable to him as eggs in a carton.
Oishi’s daughter looked up from her menu and smiled at him. “Can you Walk the Dog?” she asked.
If only children would ask me for more complicated tricks, he thought. But he complied, smiling when she asked for another trick. When he was done, he gave his yo-yo to her. “You can teach your daddy,” he told her.
Siddhu decided to skip breakfast. He didn’t want to linger and wallow in goodbyes. He got a bagel around the corner and started for Horne-Bough’s loft. He knew that he would get there later than usual if he went by foot. Would people even notice he was late or had quit? There were no rules at his office, only expectations that he’d brought from other workplaces. Perhaps he shouldn’t feel so guilty about his resignation without notice. This job had always been a pit stop on his way out of journalism. He’d given himself a year before he’d start to write political speeches or press releases for energy companies. For that reason, he wrote with the aim of reaching a breaking point.
When he showed up at his nominal workplace, it was empty except for the managing editor. Harper was eating buttered pasta while watching a stand-up comedy special on Netflix. She told him that Horne-Bough had slept in. “He has his Do Not Disturb sign up,” she told him. When he asked about the other staffers, she paused the laptop. Two reporters had quit the day before, she told him. One cited stress, another, the former intern that Siddhu once mentored, stormed off after a rooftop shouting match that she could hear from the long table downstairs. A third employee had been admitted to the hospital yesterday after feeling nauseated and feverish.