For six months after grad school, Megan Tso volunteered at a hospice. She interviewed three dozen people as part of the program and collected the raw data of their lives. Most of these patients—even the teenagers—grew excited to name their childhood addresses and elementary schools. For some people, the act of reciting their parents’ names was enough to prompt tears. Soon afterward, they would open up about forgotten pets, long-suppressed traumas, old resentments.
From this experience, Tso honed that talent for getting people to reveal their interior lives to her. The dying spoke with no fear of consequences. She, in turn, knew that some of them wanted an exchange of personal information, and because they would carry her secrets to their graves, she freely shared her own story with them. She grew close to several people at the hospice and attended their funerals. At these services, family members approached her warily, treating her as an interloper. But in a matter of weeks, she’d learned more about their spouse or parent than they had ever dared learn, and soon family members brought her into conversation, wanting to know whether they had been bad-mouthed by the deceased.
In Vancouver, circumspection came easily for Tso. Everyone hid behind their masks but spoke candidly from behind them about their nightmare scenarios and theories, their sexual prospects, their survival strategies.
Her best friends in Vancouver were Grossman, Siddhu, and Rieux. When her ex-fiancé Markus re-entered her life, she had no desire to confide in them. She liked that they knew her in this vacuum. They were not acquainted with the jittery, self-loathing version of herself. She spoke to a friend in Los Angeles about Markus, who advised her to call the police. She was reluctant to do so. Markus had never threatened her with violence directly, but he trailed her and made it impossible to get beyond him. He would back off for months at a time if she seemed distressed enough by his stalking behaviour. He’d found a line to toe.
After he called, Tso messaged Grossman for permission to stay with her. She was invited over immediately, gathered her things, and threw her iPhone in the trash. The last time Markus found her, he had hacked her phone’s location settings.
Grossman, it turned out, was eager for company. While she had been resilient in the weeks following her father’s death, she experienced a setback after receiving a letter from Janet’s lawyer demanding the return of her work. This led to an angry phone call in which Grossman’s ex-lover denounced her as a parasite. “I was making such progress on the first sentence of my novel,” Grossman said, taking fresh towels into the ground-floor suite, “but now I just want to drink scotch and eat ramen.”
Her current plan was to focus on a new project: a performance space in Janet’s old studio, a tribute to her father. It was one of a spate of new businesses that had opened since the quarantine went into effect and people began a new age of soft lawlessness. This underground economy had been prompted by the run-up in prices, a quarantine-related reduction of the workforce, and an implicit relaxation of licensing requirements. People were working as amateur massage therapists and running restaurants from their dining rooms.
Tso entered Izzy Grossman’s old apartment and saw that most of his personal effects had not yet been removed. Black-and-white photos taken in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century still hung on the walls. The appliances, cupboards, and cookware in the kitchen were from the 1970s and were mustard-yellow and fake walnut. On a bookcase she found the collected novels of Leon Uris and James Clavell. She tried to sleep on his waterbed but found herself seasick.
She laid her blanket on the couch, remembering that he had fallen ill there. On a side table was a picture of Mr Grossman with his two daughters—Grossman’s half-sister as a teenager, Grossman as a toddler. She didn’t want a dead person staring at her, so she turned the picture face-down before she fell asleep.
In the morning, Rieux appeared at the front door. He’d taken the day off from the clinic and wanted to accompany her on her Sanitation League shift. He wondered why she’d gotten rid of her phone and checked out of the hotel room. She could have dodged the question today, but not indefinitely.
“My ex-fiancé has come to Vancouver,” she told him. “He’s been giving me trouble since we split a year ago.”
Rieux’s expression remain unchanged.
“It must be easier to come into the city than to leave it,” Rieux said. He waited a moment. Then he added, “Do you want to talk about it?”
She shook her head. “Maybe later.”
They spent their morning delivering meals. The last one had to be taken to a woman who lived on a houseboat on Granville Island. She was caring for her mother who had fallen ill but refused treatment. Tso had seen the old woman a couple of times in the past month, groaning from within her daughter’s bedroom.
The houseboat was clad in corrugated aluminum. The windows facing the icy-slick boardwalk were portholes. On the rooftop was a weather vane. The daughter welcomed them inside. “She passed away this morning,” she told them.
The houseboat had polished hardwood floors, a granite kitchen island, and a baby grand piano. The old woman’s body was still in the room behind a closed door. Her death was not unexpected, but it had been sudden.
“I guess you don’t have to come by tomorrow—to help us,” she told Rieux, who nodded gravely. Tso looked at the doctor but he offered no explanations. Then the idea of what “help” might have entailed fluttered against her mind. She fought back her reaction.
The daughter asked them to wait with her until her mother’s body was taken away. She conformed to the expectations one might have about a woman who lived on a houseboat. In her forties, she was sensible in practice, eccentric in outlook. Her face was sun-creased but finely featured. She probably had a source of wealth that allowed her to project comfort. It surprised Tso that this woman would call the Sanitation League for help with cleaning and lunches instead of hiring a maid. Tso offered to make her tea. She felt the need to serve her.
“My mother was a remarkable woman,” the woman told them at her kitchen table. “She had lost my older brother in a swimming accident before I was born. Then my father died when I was still a toddler. She had to raise me alone. I once asked her how she got through it. She said she went to church every week. I think that’s where she must have caught the disease. She wrote letters every day to friends around the world. She always tried to remember the happy moments—suffering was the other side of the coin. And all of it was like a grain of sand on a beach. She used those exact words. In the last hour, she no longer seemed to be in pain. I played her favourite Sinatra records and everything within her quieted.”
From this woman’s table they had a view of the deck and the ocean kayak tied to its railing like a leashed pet. Beyond it was False Creek and the grey, ever-churning water. On the other side of False Creek were the glass condo towers of the downtown peninsula. Two paddleboarders came into view. They caught sight of the woman at the table and waved to her.
“You think you’re alone, and then the paddleboarders appear,” the woman said. “Sometimes they seem to be looking for me. I’m a little disappointed when they float by without a hello.”
The old woman’s body was collected. Rieux and Tso bid farewell to her daughter. Afterward, they walked to the market for lunch. Most of the vendor stalls, the ones that sold chocolates and salmon jerky to tourists, were empty. They got clam chowder and half sandwiches and sat outside with the seagulls.
“Did we accomplish anything?” Tso asked.
“We tried,” Rieux said. “We accomplished an attempt.”
He threw the crust of his bread for the seagulls. She knew him well enough to know that he did not like bread crust. But not well enough to know the name of his wife.
They watched the seagulls gather around the crust and he threw them another piece. “I was supposed to administer a lethal injection for her mother tomorrow,” he admitted to Tso. “They had someone else in place to do it. They had the official approval and documentation for medical assistance in dying. But the doctor they had picked fell ill, and not every doctor will do it. They asked me because they couldn’t find anyone else.”
“I gathered,” she said. “I thought you were opposed to people dying. Don’t you want people to fight?”
“My choice for the woman’s mother would have been for her to go to the hospital. Her choice was to die in her daughter’s bed. It’s her choice—by law.”
“I know the law in this country. It’s relatively new. But what about you? Isn’t your job to prolong life?” she asked him. “Isn’t that the oath you took?”
His grip on the paper cup of tea tightened. “I took on this job for status to avenge my mother’s poverty. I’m no saint. But I developed my own appreciation for medicine as I practiced it. Why am I setting a broken bone? Or why do I prescribe medication for cholesterol? It’s not about healing. I don’t have a view of life in an abstract sense. I don’t care when it begins or how precious it is compared to a gorilla’s. I just want to help people.”
She liked how his eyes caught light in mid-speech. He became engrossed when he spoke like that, searching for arguments from a bookcase in his mind.
“I read somewhere that the ability to take your own life is the kind of escape clause that makes anything bearable,” Tso suggested.
“Only if you don’t have strict religious beliefs.”
“Was that woman religious? Maybe it was an act of God that allowed her to die on her own, without a doctor’s assistance. She got her wish without committing a mortal sin.”
“Are you religious?” he asked.
“I think of myself as agnostic.”
“There’s no such thing. Either you believe or you don’t.”
“My aunt took me to Sunday school, and I cannot get those stories out of my head. Isn’t it possible not to believe in God but still feel his influence?”
“Dostoyevsky would agree with you.” He sighed. “Anyhow, I’m glad I didn’t have to give a lethal injection. I wasn’t looking forward to it.”
The paddleboarders came into view from under the Granville Street Bridge. “I used to think people who were into paddleboarding looked stupid. Are you surfing or are you canoeing? Pick a lane,” Tso said. “Now they seem different. They look brave: ‘We won’t let a pandemic interfere with our indecisive recreational activity.’”
Rieux waved to the paddleboarders. They waved back. “I’ve always wanted to try it out,” he said, looking at her with a raised eyebrow.
They found the aqua-sports rental facility. Lessons were two hours long but not being offered in the winter. Rieux lied and said they’d paddleboarded before. The person behind the counter looked at Tso’s skinny jeans and leather boots, but he didn’t say anything. He slid the two waiver forms toward them.
Rieux paid for the rental of two paddleboards, paddles, and wetsuits. They changed at the rental place and left their clothes there. She watched him carry his paddleboard. This is a bad idea. He didn’t look like he knew how to carry it. They headed toward the marina and walked to the end of a boardwalk where Rieux stopped to look at his phone. He had Googled “how to paddleboard.”
“It’s simple,” he announced afterward, snapping his lifejacket in place. “Let me try it first.” He lay his board down on the water. Then he picked it up and pointed it in the opposite direction. He reached for a springy leash attached to the board and cuffed it around his ankle. Dropping to his knees on the boardwalk, he crawled over to the board.
Rieux’s features and manner were, if not exactly WASP-y, then de-ethnicized. It took this attempt at water sports to remind Tso that he had to cultivate his whiteness, that he took pains to behave as though he hadn’t been raised by a poorly educated Chinese woman.
Still on his knees, he paddled away from the dock. He looked like he was impaling the water, and the loop that he took was awkward. Eventually, though, he stood, wobbly at first, then confident. He looked the way a boy does before he learns to draw the curtains on his face.
“Now it’s your turn,” he told her. “It’s easy.”
She dropped her board into the water but couldn’t get over its bobbing. She had gone surfing before, she’d ziplined. And now she was stuck in an infectious disease zone, and her maniacal ex-fiancé had just come into town. Why am I afraid of this? she thought. She pulled her board back in.
“I don’t think I want to,” she said. “I’ve done enough that scares me.”
He nodded, but stayed in the water, looping. “What part of it scares you?”
“Standing.”
He brought his board alongside the dock, steadying it with his paddle. “Let me give you a ride. You don’t have to, but …”
She cautiously climbed aboard his paddleboard, facing forward in front of him and kneeling. He paddled away from the sailboats and yachts and toward the Burrard Street bridge, but soon they doubled back and under the shadow of the Granville Street Bridge. Still on her knees, she lowered herself to get as close as she could to being eye-level with the water.
“Imagine how nice this would be if we were doing it in July,” he said. “How are you faring?”
“Up and down,” she admitted.
And then she told him about a doomed relationship with someone whose violence was made worse because he’d never physically hurt her. In the rambling voicemails he’d leave in the past year, he talked about wanting to put them out of pain with the compassionate tones of a veterinarian used to reasoning with besotted dog owners. Every time she said “I,” he would say “we.” Markus told her she was pushing him away because of what happened to her own family. And while it was true she pushed people away for that reason, her friends needed to tell her that leaving him was still the right thing to do.
Tso could confide in Rieux because she was on the water, and she sat in front of him, not making eye contact. He was the gondolier she’d hired on a lark, in a town she was finished visiting. And because she was in the water, and the water knew everyone’s secrets. She stopped short of telling him about her mother and brother; she’d never even told the hospice patients about that. To give up her entire life story, she would need to be conversing with an ancient mariner.
Then she imagined Rieux plunging a needle into Markus and putting him out of her misery.
On the shore, a child in a face mask waved at her. Soon they were passing the houseboats. The woman they’d visited was on her deck, leaning against the rail. She called out something they couldn’t quite understand, something along the lines of, “I should have expected to see you.”
And yet Tso didn’t expect to see her. She was surprised to see a familiar face. Tso had been thinking about how unlikely it was that she was here, on the water. You think to yourself, who would ever do something like this? Then you think, what if I do this? Just to play a role. Then you’re passing by someone. And that person thinks, who would do something like this?
They were on the water for half an hour, tops, before Rieux needed to turn back. He admitted that paddleboarding was a test of his core strength. In the last stretch, Tso could feel the strain in his strokes. She wished she could take over.
“Shall we get back to our work?” he asked her. They had just stepped onto the dock. The water in False Creek had returned the softness to his face. The tone of his voice had changed. There had been only duty and determination in it two hours before, mustered with scalding tea on his tongue. Now he seemed to be speaking with the water under his feet. He asked his question as though it were the answer itself.
“Shall we get back to our work?” she asked back.
And so they did.