“This space was created by a cataclysm,” she said shortly after giving the land acknowledgment. “Everyone here has seen a friend or family member or co-worker fall ill. Some of us have lost our livelihoods. Some of us no longer have reasons to get out of bed. When this crisis is done, the city will hire a world-famous artist to build a monument to those who perished. It’ll be fucking beautiful. And I will drive my tour bus around it and talk about how difficult this period was. But who will pay tribute to the rest of us who lived and are still searching for new reasons to get out of bed? Only we can do it. We pay tribute to each other. Tonight, I pay tribute to you.”
The speakers varied in quality. Some spoke with notes and stumbled over their own sentences. Others came off as too polished. One speaker, a professional comedian, made light of his maniacal devotion toward cleanliness that led him to develop a crack addiction to offset the stress. Another storyteller, a florist by trade, spoke of giving birth alone, right after her husband had been hospitalized with the disease. He had been one of the lucky ones, but both she and her partner had felt alone during their respective hospitalizations. As the night continued, Tso realized how far off she had been about Grossman. When they first met, Grossman seemed to her like a professional devotee. She let others take advantage of her to blot out her own thwarted ambitions. But bringing people together—Rieux had incorrectly ascribed this ability to Tso—was her genius. She magnified the talents of others. She (literally) gave them the stage on which they could shine.
Tso and Oishi allowed their friend to play host as they stacked the chairs and collected empty plastic wine glasses. Tso watched the judge throughout the performance. For the first half of the show, he reacted to every comment or laugh line a beat too late. Then he seemed in sync with the rest of the audience. Near the end, he filled his plastic cup to the brim with wine and leaned against the wall.
They finished cleaning and headed to the after-party upstairs. On their way up, they saw Farhad Khan. The smuggler rarely stayed in his apartment, only returning to change his clothes or to move boxes in and out with his associates. He stood at the top of the stairs, ready to fist bump Tso.
His eyes stopped smiling first. When they reached the top landing, he hung his head down, nodded hello, and then dashed down the stairs.
Before Tso could wonder aloud about Khan’s peculiar behaviour, Oishi told them that they knew each other. “I thought his name sounded familiar,” he said.
Oishi explained that he had met Khan during a trial. Khan had had run-ins with the law since he was a teenager and served time in youth detention centres for drug offences and stolen property. When he came into Oishi’s courtroom, he was charged with possession for the purpose of trafficking over half a million dollars of cocaine. Crown prosecutors offered him a lower sentence—one that meant he was out the door with time served—in exchange for testimony that led to the arrest of his boss.
“We’re not talking about high-level gang leaders, but a bunch of kids who were in over their heads,” Oishi explained. “If this boss was a pro, Khan would have been dead years ago. There’d be bullet holes in his windshield, and no one would care—because he deserved it.” Instead, a young wannabe was given the task of killing him soon after his release. He was supposed to be at a party. “This so-called hitman shot someone who happened to be wearing the same shoes,” he said. “What a waste. He was innocent. He was someone’s kid.”
Tso didn’t spend much time at Grossman’s after-party. There were too many sad stories swirling in her head. She returned to Izzy Grossman’s apartment and tried to fall asleep on the couch.
In her book she’d written about the need to ascribe meaning to death. She had come to the conclusion that only heroic firefighters and villainous terrorists authored their own meaningful demises. For everyone else, a full, well-lived life could be undermined by a painful or abrupt exit. Survivors scrambled to give meaning in these moments. They would say that someone who died after a long struggle with terminal cancer used their end of life to demonstrate grace and courage. If a ninety-year-old man died while rock-climbing, loved ones could speak about his passion for the sport. But in the past three months, Vancouverites had faced deaths that resisted meaning. People died prematurely, painfully, and for no reason. At least this suffering happened collectively, and survivors could take comfort in one another. But even in this ocean of collective anguish, there were people who felt lonely in their pain.
Megan was woken early the next day by two police officers. She was asked to identify the body of a man who was killed the previous night in a traffic accident on Denman Street. The victim was described as a Caucasian male in his late twenties or early thirties with light brown hair and blue eyes and a “trumpet-like symbol” tattooed on his right bicep—Markus was a Thomas Pynchon fan. He died without identification. Among his possessions was an address book with her name and the hotel that she had checked out of weeks earlier. The front-desk clerk at the hotel who knew that Tso had often shared meals with Oishi called the judge in his room. She didn’t hear the voicemail that Oishi had left for her until she grabbed her phone on the way out the door.
“Did he run into traffic?” Tso asked the police officer. She had never taken Markus’s talk of suicide seriously. It felt like a scare tactic.
“I don’t know the details,” the officer replied. “But there were witnesses at the intersection. And the death is being treated as accidental.”
Tso wanted time to clear her head. The police officers insisted on driving her to the morgue at Vancouver General Hospital. She threw on her coat over her pyjamas and stepped into the back of the police cruiser. The morgue, one officer explained, was functioning at full capacity, so the city was doing its best to dispatch bodies.
The night before, she had dreamed that she’d seen Markus on the street and run after him on the icy sidewalks near the hotel. The faster she ran after him, calling out his name, the more desperate he seemed to evade her. The dream ended with the policeman’s knock on the door. If it hadn’t, would she have chased him blindly into traffic?
At the morgue, she was taken to a room decked out with Haida art and boxes of Kleenex on a coffee table. A grief counsellor entered the room and explained that Tso would not need to see the body herself. “This isn’t like TV shows,” she explained. She held a clipboard with a picture of the deceased and placed the picture on the table face down. Tso turned the picture over immediately and saw that half of his face was swollen and bloodied. The other half—the right side—was the one she had seen for the better part of two years, snoring peacefully, when she woke first.
“Do you recognize this face?” the grief counsellor asked.
“I do,” she told her. “We lived together in California. We were engaged. He was used to driving. He was a lousy pedestrian. Like me.”
How did this happen? He had spent so much time torturing her. Just yesterday he was postering the city in search of her. And then he was gone—like that. Suddenly, ambiguously, randomly. She was released from him. She didn’t know whether she now felt broken or had already been broken. She had broken herself to keep from being irreparably destroyed.
She last saw Markus alive at a reading in West Hollywood, a year earlier. He interrupted the event with his accusations and she had to stop making public appearances in Los Angeles for that reason. Still he had no trouble finding her; they had friends in common. Tso didn’t move out of the city. He would find out where she lived but stop short of confronting her.
He preferred to leave reminders instead. This was his final reminder.