Megan Tso spent three nights on Janice Grossman’s couch after her father’s sudden death. Three nights was enough time to feel as though she’d given of herself to another without the resentment of martyrdom. Although it wasn’t an entire week of sitting shiva, she thought seventy-two hours felt like a traditional interval for helping an acquaintance through a tough time; it was like a “minute of silence” or “forty days in the desert.”
She remembered something she’d read the other day: The term “quarantine” had been coined by plague-struck Venetians in the fourteenth century. “Quarantinario” was Italian for “forty days.” Ships coming into the port city had to wait out that period, while flying a yellow and black flag, before passengers could step foot on the mainland. What Tso wouldn’t give to know that this quarantine would last only forty days—even fifty would be okay. As it was, the word had decoupled from its etymology.
When Grossman texted the news of her father’s death, Tso had already been out on a run to clear her head after the previous night’s boozy outing with Rieux. It was barely eight when she left the hotel. She bought oranges, cereal, and milk at a corner store that had just opened, then took a taxi to Grossman’s.
“They took him into the auxiliary hospital,” Grossman said. “They told me to go home, but I waited. When I spoke to a doctor after he died, he said I couldn’t see the body because of infection, so part of my brain keeps telling me he must’ve switched wristbands with another elderly white male patient.” Her voice was hoarse and emphatic. “I don’t know how someone who never left his apartment, never saw anyone, who hired somebody to wash his kitchen floors with bleach every week, could become infected. If he could fall sick, I may as well run around licking toilet seats.”
Grossman’s gaze swam around the room. Tso forced her to sit and placed a bowl of cereal in front of her. Grossman took a bite and pushed it away. “I don’t even know what I want. Except to clean my dad’s room.”
Tso wanted to be like the white people she’d grown up watching on TV; someone who could stroke a friend or acquaintance like a house pet. Instead, she placed her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. “We can do that later,” she told her. “You’re exhausted.”
“Sorry to text you when I did. My first thought was to call Janet, but then I hated myself for thinking of talking to her. I could imagine her saying nice things to me while Happy Dancing at her house. Janet and my father hated each other. Sorry again,” she told Tso. Milk dribbled on her chin. “You must be exhausted.”
Tso was cutting oranges. She had already gone for a run, and her knees were stiff. She said, “A little tired.”
“Would you sleep with me?” Grossman asked. “I miss having someone next to me.”
Tso stopped cutting oranges. “Sleep sleep, right?”
“Of course.” She started rubbing her arms nervously. Everything about this house—the blackout curtains, the candles—gave the impression that Grossman was not a morning person. “I wouldn’t suggest we do that. Just forget I said anything.”
“I would like to sleep with you,” Tso said slowly, sounding like someone reciting from a script for people learning the English language.
Grossman shook her head, though her gaze drifted toward the bedroom. “It would probably be awkward.”
Tso was, in fact, intrigued by the idea of a sleeping partner. For an entire year after she moved in with her aunt, they would spend an hour in her bed at night talking about their plans for the next day. The prospect of being with someone, of feeling someone’s warmth—day in, day out—was something she craved and wanted to be ready for. She refused to take up more than half the king-sized mattress in her hotel suite.
She waited for Grossman to change into her pyjamas and climb onto the air mattress. The bed was pushed up against the wall, and Grossman took the outside half. Tso removed her shoes and jacket but kept the rest of her clothes on. She lay down next to Grossman, arms across her chest, elbow brushing against her friend. She felt self-consciously jittery.
Grossman told her that she planned to call the funeral home when she woke up. Her father had prepaid for his funeral decades earlier and made detailed arrangements. “He didn’t think I could handle it,” she told Tso. “My half-sister lives in Montreal. He always trusted her more. If she were the daughter living in this city, he wouldn’t have preplanned.”
Grossman’s father was much older than Tso had suspected. Born before World War II, he and his parents crossed the Atlantic—first to Brooklyn, then Montreal—before such trips became urgent escapes for Jewish people. Izzy Grossman left school early and found his first restaurant job at age thirteen, then he started to work in the entertainment industry. He moved to Vancouver in 1963, where he met his first wife and started a talent-booking club. He managed a roster of song-and-dance acts. “But he didn’t like the direction music was going in,” she told Tso. “And my dad had an affair with a chorus girl who would eventually become my mother. Once they married, she didn’t approve of his lifestyle.” He briefly ran a comedy club until it burned down. “My mother had left him six months earlier for her high-school sweetheart. Let’s just say that made him careless about fire safety.” With his insurance money, he bought the house and eked out a living through his rental suites and the grocery store. “We’re always talking about me,” Grossman said. “Why don’t you ever talk about yourself?” She lay her head on Tso’s shoulder. She gave the appearance of being larger than she actually was, mainly because of her frizzy hair and wide hips.
“I’m the least interesting person I know,” Tso told her. It was a practiced response to a common question. “When I reminisce, even about the good things, it makes me sad.”
“You talk about your aunt,” Grossman observed through a yawn. “What happened to your parents?”
“My mother died in a car accident,” she lied. “I never knew my dad. He had always been out of the picture. See? Sad.”
Tso felt an urge to talk about how her mother liked to sweep. And how Tso had asked for a child-sized broom to sweep along with her. And how her mother sang under her breath. She would have spoken these thoughts aloud except that Grossman began to snore. Grossman’s arm swung over her, like she was used to hugging someone larger in bed, but Tso decided to let her sleep for another twenty minutes before she wriggled out of the bed. She felt Grossman’s hot breath beat on her shoulders. A puddle of drool collected on her neck.
It would have been a long twenty minutes if Farhad Khan had not knocked. It seemed like he was still singing the same song to himself in Persian as the last time Tso had seen him, three weeks earlier.
“My friend! My saviour!” he said, pulling off his earphones. His skin was the colour of clay and he had a precise beard that looked drawn onto his face. In each ear he wore diamond studs and sported a Lionel Messi soccer jersey. He held a bottle of vodka and a package wrapped in brown paper. “I come home. I see the front door open. I see the door of Mr Izzy open. He is not there, so I come up.” He held up the bottle of vodka. “This is for Mr Izzy.” He held up the brown paper package. “And this is for the daughter, for being my other saviour.”
Tso explained the situation, hoping not to alarm Khan. “We’re going to clean Mr Grossman’s place,” she insisted. “Just be careful.”
Khan threw his hands up to his cheeks; he seemed unconcerned about infection. “This poor woman. What a good man. And she is a loyal daughter,” he told Tso, suddenly sounding older than he was. He moved a little closer toward her and said in a whisper, “If there is anything you need—because right now, there are so many shortages—just ask me. I can help. Anything to return the favour.”
He left the bottle of vodka and the brown paper package with Tso. Within the package were two frozen wild salmon steaks.
“I don’t know what he’s doing—but he’s already paid four months of back rent,” Grossman explained upon waking. “And I have never seen him happier. He must be the happiest man in the city.”
“All it took was an epidemic,” Tso replied with a whistle.
“When you think of it, the disease puts everything in perspective,” Grossman added before breaking into the first of many teary jags. Tso brought her water and a Benadryl.
Once Grossman was asleep again, Tso left to retrieve her toothbrush from the hotel and returned with vegetables and rice to serve with the salmon steaks. Then she picked the best Netflix indie romantic comedies. She felt useful.
Grossman had an appointment at a funeral parlour for the next day. Tso accompanied her. When they arrived, they were asked to wait in a reception area that was so crowded they needed to stand. They waited forty-five minutes until a funeral services agent, a dewy-faced young woman who shared a surname with the business, welcomed them into her office. She apologized for the delay. “As you can see, we’ve had a lot of appointments.”
Grossman handed over her prepaid policy papers and began listing her specific needs. Her father didn’t want a religious funeral; he had disavowed Judaism as a teenager. He wanted laughter. “It should be in a small room, as my dad kept to himself in his later years,” she continued. “And I want a cherry oak casket.”
The funeral staffer’s eyes flitted between the contract that Grossman brought and her computer screen. “I’m afraid we have a problem,” she said, turning back from the screen. “At the moment we only have the capacity to do cremation burials.” They had run out of caskets; new inventory hadn’t yet been brought in. And they had no idea when they might get caskets.
“But my father has a full-sized plot,” Grossman said.
“That’s wonderful,” the agent said matter-of-factly. “You’re lucky to have had a parent who planned so well. Dad left you with so many options.”
The single plot (purchased, along with the funeral, in a lugubrious period following Izzy Grossman’s second divorce) could be subdivided. Some of it could be reserved for Janice or her sister. Or she could sell the land, which had a prime location in the city’s only cemetery, Mountain View. The value of the land, mirroring residential property, had grown exponentially in the past year. And then there was the “plague premium.” As it stood, with other cemeteries outside the city limits, there were bodies and cremated remains that would not be buried until the quarantine was lifted. Muslim and Jewish families, whose faiths did not allow for cremation, were most grievously affected. Mr Grossman’s plot was a prize. “In this market,” the agent concluded, “you would make a killing.”
Grossman pulled her grey curls over her face and rocked in her chair. Tso leaned into her and asked if she wanted to go. Grossman shook her head. “I just thought this would go more smoothly,” she whispered back. “I don’t need to turn a profit.” She took a breath and asked the funeral agent if they could build their own casket.
“From pine?” the agent asked. Her placid demeanor was suddenly transformed, and she re-clicked her computer mouse as though she could regain her composure through repetition.
“I would have to find a carpenter,” Grossman answered. “But we would use better material.”
The agent excused herself. “I’m sort of new here,” she told them. “I need to consult with my manager.” She returned five minutes later, a smile reapplied to her face, and told them that a homemade casket would work.
For Grossman, the job of building a casket offered a diversion from the more mundane tasks of funeral planning and excavating her father’s apartment. When they got home, Grossman called a friend, a cabinetmaker, to commission the project. But this friend was preoccupied by the illness of her wife, who had been admitted to the auxiliary hospital the day after Grossman’s father. She then called a contractor only to be told that he was booked solid. Since the quarantine, some homeowners had thrown themselves into renovations and other time-consuming improvement projects. They surmised that the city was too preoccupied to notice that this work was being done without permits. And they had nothing better to do.
“That leaves us with one option,” Grossman said. She then committed to building her own casket for her father. For half of that day, she was engrossed in the project, following online instructions for a “toe-pincher” style pine coffin. She and Tso went to the hardware store to collect the boards, handsaw, nails, wood glue, clamps, and rope. Grossman put it together in the former grocery store that had once been Janet’s art studio. The ice-frosted windows of the store allowed in more light than Tso expected and was reflected in the polished wood floors. On the interior walls, some oil paintings by Grossman’s former lover still hung. In those paintings, Grossman was depicted fully clothed—not as a figure of beauty but a dominating presence. In one image, she was pictured as a herder in a field of goats. In another, she leaned into a pool table lining up a shot. “I’ve been meaning to send those back to Janet,” she said once she noticed Tso looking at the paintings. “She wants to burn them. She says the style is too primitive. And that she used Indigenous imagery that might be considered appropriative. She’s worried I’ll ruin her career,” she added, measuring the casket’s centre floorboard. “What she should really be worried about is the novel I’m writing. It’s in the fantasy genre to avoid defamation, but it’s really about her.”
By nightfall, Grossman and Tso had put together the pine casket. The website suggested that it could also be used as a stage or Halloween prop. When they were done, they had realized that promise. It looked like something without being that something. Grossman sobbed at the result. “We’ll figure out an alternative,” Tso told her. She led her upstairs and back to sleep.
That evening, Tso allowed Grossman to spoon her until she began to snore. Once she detached herself, she stepped out of the apartment, across the landing, and knocked on Farhad Khan’s door.
“Ah—my saviour!” Khan shouted. He was bare-chested, in a pair of running shorts. “Please, come in.”
The front hallway to the apartment was lined with liquor boxes and cartons of cigarettes. Tso walked by the kitchenette where she had found him after his suicide attempt. The upturned chair remained on the checkerboard floor. “You seem to have some new business concerns,” she said.
“Yeah, I have some friends who fix me up,” he said, flopping into the middle of a couch. She couldn’t help noticing that he had the torso of a swimmer: a tanned, hairless inverted triangle. The torsos she’d seen most recently had all been narrow, wiry, and tattooed. Between the couch and a large television playing cable news, she saw a hookah. “You smoke?” he asked.
“Not in a long time,” she said, remembering a trip to Istanbul as a backpacker. She sat across from him in a matching armchair that she didn’t remember from her last visit. He huffed the hookah pipe, blowing smoke that made his eyes water, and passed it to her.
The water at the bottom of the blue-glass basin bubbled. She held up her hands, staring at the mouthpiece as if it were the barrel of a pistol. “We’ve got to be careful about infection these days.”
He broke out in laughter. His eyes were red and glassy as he took another puff. “Okay, maybe you are right,” he said. “But look at Mr Izzy—such a careful man. So proper, so clean. He doesn’t want to be around no one. Not even his nice daughter. And he dies. So if I die, I should die with others.”
Tso decided she would get to the point. “You said you could help. By that you mean you can get goods through the barricades?”
“Before I got depressed, I used to sell and re-sell. Long time ago, it used to be bad things. It was bad, not so bad.” He leaned back into the couch. “The kind of things kids get in trouble selling. When this sickness happened, it was like a wake-up call. I need to get back to business. I need to make money. I need to love life.” He pointed his pinched fingertips in the air in emphasis and took another hookah hit to settle himself. “Let us … jump chase. It’s easier to bring things into the city, but I can also take things out.”
“You mean like mail?” Tso asked, knowing immediately she’d missed the mark.
He dipped his nose and looked at her with incredulity. “I am saying I can get you out. Isn’t that what you want? I won’t take money from you, but my associates will charge a fee. It won’t be cheap.”
She shook her head. “No. What I need is a coffin for Mr Grossman.”
He laughed again. “Ah, that is easy. I get you one by tomorrow—the day after, at the latest.”
When the coffin arrived the next day, Khan waved off any attempts to pay him. “Maybe I ask for a favour back,” he told Tso. “Like in The Godfather.”
Three days had passed, and Tso left Grossman’s house knowing that she had done as much as she could for her friend. At the funeral, so many people came to pay their respects to Izzy Grossman that the small room was quickly filled. Latecomers listened to Janice Grossman’s eulogy, which was funny enough to earn a standing ovation, from the hallway.
Within two months of the quarantine, when weekly deaths peaked at two hundred and twelve, the scarcity of burial space in Vancouver would become an issue that distracted people with righteous anger. The city crematorium operated seven days a week. City land earmarked for a playground was used for those who needed urgent burial for their loved ones, but even then, bodies and remains were stacked on top of one another. If only Grossman knew this at the time, Tso thought. Her father hadn’t really gone too early. He was first in line.