Raymond Siddhu needed the walk home from the bus stop to clear the exhaust fumes from his lungs. There was no sidewalk where they lived, so he would step into the outer lip of a grassy ditch whenever a car passed by. A neighbour once called the cops when he saw him on his evening stroll. Siddhu could not fault his neighbour; being a pedestrian qualified as a suspicious activity here. The physical aloofness of suburban life—different from the more social standoffishness seen within the city limits—would keep his family safe as long as they avoided the mall and cleaned their hands after paying at the drive-thru window.
When he came through the door, his boys tottered toward him, each holding out their arms like high-wire performers. They’d started walking only two weeks earlier, and he saw their steps grow more steady with each new day.
Perhaps, Siddhu considered, the image of their father grimacing at them would have no effect on their psyches. They would not remember the days when Daddy pried them off with a closed umbrella on the way to the sink to scrub his hands. He returned, eyes smiling, grabbing each of them under his arms and spinning around until they squealed and giggled.
“Put them down,” Uma Siddhu said. She was wearing an apron and a high-school era sweatshirt. “Time to eat.”
“You should have started without me.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“You know you get angry when you’re hungry.”
“And you know you get stupid when you open your mouth.”
So far, there had been no reports of the disease outside the city’s downtown core. Uma still suggested that he take a leave from work. “You’re being an alarmist,” he said accusingly as Uma placed their dinner on the messy table where their boys had already eaten.
“What are you, then?” she asked back.
“Being rational.”
She scoffed at him. She was the even-tempered one in their marriage, the one who found compromise. He was the impulse shopper grabbing fistfuls of chocolate bars at the checkout counter. “There are no rationalists in these situations,” she told him. “There are those who let it happen to them and the alarmists. Pick a side.”
As they ate, they watched their boys in the living room ambling around, looking for something to topple. Before too long they would find each other. They would fight over a box. Tears would follow.
“This tastes good,” he told her. He didn’t even know what he was putting in his mouth. It was brown—it had been pressure-cooked—and served on rice. Her parents, who lived on the other side of the duplex, were in Asia, so he and Uma relished their ability to eat quick meals.
He didn’t want to make her angry. He did not want to tell her that he’d spent the day at a hospital speaking to health officials, who claimed to be waiting for results, and doctors. Or that he’d been in a hospital with people who didn’t cough into their elbows. Maybe Uma had a point about safety—he couldn’t take chances, now that he was a father. That’s why he’d sold his motorcycle and stopped playing rec hockey after he broke his ankle.
And he wanted to have sex with her that night, even if he needed to put the boys to sleep on his own (so she could relax) and take a shower. He listened to himself chew, to the clack of cutlery on plates.
“You know this is a great story,” he said. “It’ll be the only chance I get to write one.”
He could hear one boy creak, a prelude to angry sobs of a wish unheeded. The other one was cackling wickedly. Siddhu was reminded of the fact that his own younger brothers hadn’t called him since the summer.
“If you took on the metro beat, you could write about gang warfare. You could be first on the scene of every drive-by execution. If you pry enough, we might get threatening phone calls at night. You might even get killed, but you wouldn’t bring disease into this house,” she suggested. “Would that be exciting enough for you?”
“It’s not about excitement,” Siddhu told her. Correction: It was only partially about thrill. He was carrying out a promise he’d made to himself: The newspaper would die, but not because of his departure. He was a self-appointed officer aboard a sinking ship.
“Let that website cover the story,” she told him. “They’ve beaten you so far.”
It was true that GSSP had broken the news about the first fatalities. They had been the first to comment on the delays between setbacks in infection management and reports from the Health Authority. On one level, Siddhu had been glad that someone had reported the story. And yet he was stunned—up until then, GSSP’s reporting had been inept, even with its click-generated wealth. Until recently, they had only one reporter, the website owner, Elliot Horne-Bough, whom everyone referred to as Hornblow. He dressed in skinny neckties and took photos using a Polaroid camera. How could I be losing stories to him? And why does he want to hire me? Meanwhile, Siddhu was interviewing city councillors about the restricted access to disease flashpoints. In these areas, signage had been erected advising only local traffic to enter. Other notices strongly advised wearing face masks.
Today, he’d attended a mid-afternoon special council meeting that ended in a fight when a councillor from Romeo Parsons’ party attacked the mayor for his inability to immediately provide better temporary housing and showering stations in economically disadvantaged parts of the city. It represented Parsons’ first broken promise in his initial month as mayor, the councillor told him. Siddhu watched Parsons’ face as it tightened into something rigid and clenched before loosening back into appealing handsomeness.
The councillor, a twenty-nine-year-old advocate for sex workers, had been personally recruited by Parsons. When the mayor deflected her earnest pleas, she rose from her seat in the cherry-panelled council chambers. She was seated at the far end of the room from the mayor, and as she rushed toward him another female councillor, a Parsons loyalist from the same party, took her by the arm. The first councillor struck the other one with an open hand and left the council chambers.
Siddhu tried to change the discussion with Uma. He asked her about the boys’ music class—they banged tambourines on play mats while the teacher sang nursery rhymes. The range of their conversations had narrowed to two sharp points since the boys were born.
She brought out her smartphone. He decided not to repeat his question.
Siddhu offered to give the boys a bath while his wife watched Netflix. He decided against washing their hair to avoid tears and let them play with a plastic tea set. After their bath, he dried and dressed them, then flashed his yo-yo as both boys pulled themselves up against the crib railing. He was working on a more intermediate-level trick: Split the Atom. It started out like a Brain Twister but involved another step. The boys lost interest as he worked on the pushing motion. He won them back with his old standbys until they had slumped back into their cribs. Then he waited at the door until they cried themselves to sleep.
In the weeks that ensued, he would summon each of these moments to savour like heirlooms from a lost world.
His wife waited for him under the covers, already naked. As he stripped down, she held up a corner of the duvet for him like an open car door and he felt the chill of the air on his chest. He rolled toward her in bed, and they reached for each other, pulling all the compulsory levers. There was no time to tease or upgrade from the basic package. They felt grateful for the certainty of their flesh. A cry from the other room would force them to freeze; a longer wail would shut things down. Hurry, hurry. Success, success.
Siddhu lay there afterward in the light from the hall. The bedroom took on a grainy quality, and he slept poorly. Uma and the boys were still asleep when he awoke and packed his lunch. When he got on the bus, he found a seat—normally, he had to stand. On the SkyTrain, he was one of only two people in his car. From the station, he stepped outside to see that the sun had broken. The office buildings glinted in the damp air with the sheen of plastic wrap.
It had taken a potential health crisis for the mood in the office to brighten. People moved quickly. No one here thought that their work would gain new subscriptions or earn them kudos, but it seemed like a rewarding diversion. Like Siddhu, they saw opportunities for noble career deaths.
At his mentor’s retirement party, the paper’s thirty-year veteran—the Chicago-born wife of a draft dodger—took him aside and asked him to start sending out his résumé. “I’m not worried about old goats like me,” she told him. “And I don’t know the newbies well enough to give a shit. But I’m worried about you. You’ve been here for all of the bad years and none of the good ones. The paper looks like it’ll die by the end of the work week, but it’s going to keep sputtering for a few more years. I’m worried that, by then, you’ll be too long in the tooth to be employable. Even worse than that, I’m concerned that it’ll make you a good family man, at the expense of your work. They say no one dies wishing they worked more. Absolute bullshit. Maybe if you’re selling hot dogs. Not so much when your job is looking at the world.” Siddhu remembered her talk verbatim. She had never said that much in their entire working relationship.
He took his place at her desk and started her old computer. In his inbox was a notice from the city’s communications director about a press conference. It related to the fight in council. He caught the train to City Hall and arrived early, taking his place in the front row next to Horne-Bough.
“It’s definitely about the fight,” Horne-Bough said in a stage whisper. He held his Polaroid camera with both hands. “The mayor’s ego has been clipped by the radical wing of his party. They’re going to lift the restrictions on the area around the Annex. ‘Freedom is given to everyone in this city, or no one.’”
“Maybe you should be holding the press conference,” Siddhu said through glassy laughter. He had a feeling that the mayor would repeat those same sentiments, in those words. “Who’s your source?”
“I’ll tell you, if you answer my own question. Where does one get the best craft Kölsch in the downtown area?”
“Are you counting Strathcona?” Siddhu asked. He’d occasionally post about breweries for the paper’s food and drink blog. Horne-Bough had been doing his research.
“Anywhere within a fifteen-minute cab ride.”
Siddhu offered a detailed and comprehensive ranking of breweries that any reasonable person would describe as overkill.
“As you know, I’ve been trying to get you to our offices for two weeks,” Horne-Bough said after Siddhu’s disquisition. “Maybe you’re afraid of me. I don’t take it personally. A more informal venue might help. What if I were to invite you for one of those Kölschs tonight?”
Romeo Parsons bounded in front of the podium. Siddhu noticed that he had a habit of mouthing certain phrases, the money lines of his prepared remarks, before he spoke. He wore a blue tie that matched the curtains behind him. Those curtains were a lighter tint of blue than the blue used by the previous mayor. The colour change had been a recommendation from a branding firm—at a cost of $12,000. “They really bring out his eyes,” the reporter from a local radio station snickered. It was the first time that Siddhu had heard an unkind remark uttered about the mayor.
Parsons began with an apology for the fight in City Hall. “These are tense times. There’s been unnecessary panic and finger-pointing,” he said. “We’ve seen nothing like this in our city since the Spanish Influenza at the end of the First World War.” Siddhu had heard that the city councillor who’d attacked him had left the caucus. (Later that day, she announced she was sitting as an independent.)
What made Parsons an electrifying speaker was a modest amount of eloquence refracted through joyfulness. Even now he smiled, but it wasn’t a hayseed smile; Parsons was a Rhodes Scholar, and he sat on the board of directors of the Art Institute of Chicago. The rest of his remarks fell in line with Horne-Bough’s prediction. Parsons added that he regretted the advice he’d been given from the Coastal Health Authority about the neighbourhood restrictions.
“What happened was that we needed to balance health safety with our concerns about our city’s most marginalized people. We failed in this regard. We have heard stories about harassment from our most desperate people. We have further demonized our most vulnerable people. Meanwhile, rates of infection haven’t decreased. The roadblocks have caused traffic congestion.” New measures would be announced soon to take the place of the old ones. “These new guidelines will be fairly applied to all. Until then, we all must proceed carefully. We don’t know the true extent of this health situation.”
The question period followed. Most queries were couched in praise for the mayor’s demeanor. There was still an aura about him, and the press still wanted him to succeed. Their own work as political reporters had been lifted by Parsons’ lofty profile. Voter turnout had risen by a quarter because of his presence. People talked about residential zoning and garbage collection with the same depth of feeling as they would about the all-time greatest hockey players. Relatives and friends of reporters inquired about their work with interest.
To his credit, only Horne-Bough asked a question that unnerved the mayor. “According to some accounts, twenty-nine people have died. When will we know this is a crisis?”
“I—I don’t think it’s, uh, twenty-nine,” Parsons stammered. “That’s not confirmed.” The rest of the mayor’s mumbled response could not be stitched into a coherent reply.
As the mayor finished the conference, he approached Horne-Bough and Siddhu, who had stood by the exit. “I hope you don’t mind some tough questions,” Horne-Bough said.
The mayor smirked. “I’m still standing.”
“Care to be in a Polaroid with a colleague?” he asked. “It’s for my private collection.”
“Anything involving Ray-Ray here is okay,” the Mayor insisted. He put one arm around Siddhu. The mayor smelled like he had been outside all day. It wasn’t a bad odour. He gave off the smell of someone who’d spent the afternoon hiking through a rainforest path. Parsons held the same camera-ready smile even as Horne-Bough tried his shot from various angles, finally holding the Polaroid over his head.
Later, at a nearby gastropub, Horne-Bough confessed that he was trying to see how long the mayor could hold his expression; the Polaroid shots caught only the tops of their heads. Each of them had the brewery’s tasting flights arranged in front of them on wooden trays. Horne-Bough seemed taken aback by the set-up—it looked like a science project. “I am more of a soju drinker,” he confessed. “I don’t even need fancy soju.”
Horne-Bough looked to be in his mid-twenties. He came from a wealthy Toronto family and had arrived in Vancouver only two years earlier. Although he was privileged, he claimed that his money was largely his own. Four years earlier, he’d placed most of a small inheritance into the hands of some boarding-school friends who’d launched an app that was later sold for what was rumoured to be a nine-figure sum. He had little experience in news besides a CBC internship he’d completed after high school.
With the exception of that internship, Horne-Bough’s work experience consisted of a string of odd, low-skill jobs: he played the “white guy” in a number of Korean TV shows after working on a documentary in Seoul. He cared for a falcon in Antwerp owned by an eccentric Belgian industrialist who dabbled in illegal arms dealing. He herded yaks in Tibet for two brothers married to the same woman—a local practice meant to keep land within a family. He so enjoyed recounting these workplace tales that Siddhu wondered whether that wasn’t the point in acquiring them. After all, he didn’t need the money. As he listed his jobs, he bounced between the mannerisms of a fey layabout and the more aggressive language of a bootstrapping start-up head.
“I don’t do well if I don’t have something to do,” he said. “Or something in my hands.”
“You should work with wood,” Siddhu suggested.
Horne-Bough’s eyes flashed then dimmed. “Except that I’m so absent-minded, I’d lose a finger.”
“Better yet,” Siddhu said, palming the yo-yo, “you should get one of these.”
He let the yo-yo slide out between their two stools at the bar.
“I love how it whirs,” Horne-Bough said, his eyes following the yo-yo. “That sound is wonderful.”
Like the mayor, this spindly young entrepreneur was fascinating to Siddhu. Horne-Bough was not the stingy kind of rich person, nor was he oblivious to cash. He saw money not as lifeblood but as a social lubricant. “Contrary to what you newsmen think, I want to pay for content,” Horne-Bough told him. “Maybe not a unionized shop, but wages and benefits and options.” His model was not just click-driven, but also used a subscription/patronage model from individual subscribers and institutions. GSSP’s initial staff included a couple of Siddhu’s ex-colleagues, including a formerly fresh-faced investigative reporter who’d been laid off before he could qualify for a buyout. Another staffer was a journalism grad who used to work as the mayor’s executive assistant and knew where he did his dry cleaning. “The city has grown enormously in the past decade in terms of wealth. There are people willing to pay top dollar for the best cars and food and sunglasses and ski chalets. There’s no reason why they wouldn’t want to pay more for the best news coverage. There are no better circumstances for this model to flourish.”
GSSP saw itself not only as a reporting service but a private knowledge hub, a “data concierge” for the wealthy. Horne-Bough was certain people would pay a four-figure annual subscription for, among other things, a phone number that got them a cab five minutes earlier. “Everyone else will get the news for free, but there will be a time lag—sometimes a day, sometimes fifteen minutes,” Horne-Bough suggested. “Others will still get news free before your paper can give it away. But those who have paid will have a piece of—you guessed it—gossip.”
Between their two tasting flights, Horne-Bough checked text messages on a 2007-era vintage flip phone. He’d explained he liked older technology—not as a conversation piece but because it reduced the time he spent not focusing on his present surroundings, yet he checked it and set it aside several times throughout their conversation. This time, though, he gaped at the phone. After a prolonged silence, he signalled to the waiter for a bill.
“It contradicts our workplace culture to leave a drink for the office, but this one is big,” he told Siddhu. “I need to write this story and get it out there. I won’t even have time to use my electric typewriter.”
“What is it?” Siddhu asked. He added, “I can keep a secret.”
Horne-Bough hesitated. The World Health Organization, in dialogue with Vancouver Coastal Health, had recommended a city-wide quarantine. The announcement would come quickly and leave people with the least amount of time to flee. The city wanted to avoid the situation that had occurred in Surat, India in 1994, when the disease struck and three hundred thousand people evacuated the city in fear of being quarantined.
Flights coming into the city were being rerouted. Roadblocks would be erected on all highways and bridges to the metro area within an hour. “You live in the boonies, don’t you? I figure you should get a head start,” he said, reaching for a wallet that was stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. Horne-Bough, whose loft was only steps away in Railtown, preferred cash because he’d lost his wallet too many times to use plastic. He carried no ID for the same reason.
Siddhu began to run toward the nearest SkyTrain station. He was not physically fit, so he found himself staggering at the foot of Water Street. The city scene outside, give or take a few face masks, could have passed for any day in the past decade. The sun beat down benevolently, and the air was worth paying money to breathe. He swiped his Compass Card as he rushed through the SkyTrain gates, then ran down the steps to catch the incoming train. He was huffing and puffing when he took his seat.
The crowd on the half-full SkyTrain car was occupied by commuters who were bored, jovial, or solitary. There was a couple in their twenties making out, an extremely tall cyclist in spandex with his racing bike, one guy singing along to music with his eyes closed. He recognized a face or two: people he didn’t know, but who, like him, rode this train until its terminal point in Surrey. They had fit themselves snugly into their compartments of private space, pressed against window seats, their briefcases and purses on their laps.
He checked his phone for news coverage as the car slowed into Burrard Station. Nothing. He texted his wife to say that he was coming home. She texted back to ask him to buy string cheese. He checked his phone again. Nothing on his paper’s app or website. It occurred to him that this had been a prank and he was rushing home based on misinformation. Siddhu told himself that this could not happen. At Stadium-Chinatown station, a two-sentence item appeared on Horne-Bough’s website. When they stopped outside Science World, he received two calls from his paper’s editor-in-chief. He left them unanswered and the voicemails unopened.
On social media, there were unofficial reports about the roadblocks and the airport closure. By the time they reached the Commercial-Broadway Station, the SkyTrain had started to fill. Siddhu gave up his seat to a pregnant woman. People pushed into the car, their faces red from running and squeezing. Heads remained bowed toward their devices, and thumbs tapped screens to refresh web browsers. People whispered to one another, looking out from the corners of their eyes.
At the Joyce-Collingwood Station, the last one before they crossed city limits, Siddhu had a sense of what it might be like to commute in Tokyo or Shanghai. Many passengers who stood could no longer hold onto a strap or rail or pole. They propped themselves against other commuters desperate to get home. They still held phones up to their faces, sometimes pressed to their cheeks. They tapped and tapped.
When the train left the station, the suburbanites in the car heaved one collective sigh. When the automated voice, heralded by the ubiquitous three-toned chime, announced the next stop to be Metrotown, Siddhu heard cheers. The city limits came within sight as their train began to slow down. Siddhu waited for it to halt, but he still felt surprised. Groans flushed out the sighs. The mood spoiled. Siddhu heard someone complain that they had trouble breathing.
Five minutes passed. They began to move again. Those who were standing wilted as the car inched in the opposite direction. Everyone was quiet. They were going back into the city, back toward death. Siddhu expected an announcement over the PA system, but all he heard was the chime followed by the pre-recorded voice announcing the next stop, Joyce-Collingwood Station.
The train thinned out, more or less in the same order, with people returning to their offices and workplaces. Siddhu got off behind the man in spandex rolling his bike. He wanted to completely reverse his course and go back to his stool at the gastropub. He sent Uma a terse text message and called his boss to say he was returning to the office. Night swallowed the skyline, and the city became busier. All around were people who looked like Siddhu: stunned, moving uneasily, moving because they would look crazy if they just stood there.