Rieux was working at the auxiliary hospital when the announcement about the vaccine came. His job here was not only monotonous, but it forced him to see suffering as a collective process. He’d become accustomed to the old and weak dying, followed by healthy adults, and finally children with faces aged by pain. There were categories of patients, types of death. He needed to tell himself to speak to each one as though he would see them the next day. He administered the ineffective antibiotics as if he was pretending to be a child waving a magic wand.
Orla Castello asked him to be one of the doctors standing in the background on camera when she delivered the news about the vaccine. Rieux took his break early, disinfected himself, changed into his street clothes, and stepped outside. A communications officer from the Coastal Health Authority asked him to wear an ill-fitting set of scrubs.
“Thanks for being an extra in our production,” Castello told him. “I’m just the warm-up act. Our headliner is waiting in the wings. We need star power for this.”
A small crowd of news media had been assembled, though most of the news figures here looked at Castello skeptically. Not even Siddhu’s nerd-chic employer had bothered to bring his Polaroid camera. If the vaccine had been released a month earlier, there would have been spontaneous street parties. In that time, though, Castello had made announcements about positive but temporary shifts in infection and mortality rates. Her office had issued press releases that did nothing but reiterate the devotion of the city’s medical staff. Any residual excitement about the vaccine had been eaten away by timed leaks about its imminence.
As promised, Castello’s prepared statement about the vaccine was brief, with no time given for questions. She introduced another speaker to talk about the city’s plan to encourage vaccination.
It took Rieux a split second to recognize the mayor when he emerged from behind a door. There were gasps among the news media and some of the medical staff in their scrubs when Parsons made this first public appearance since the scandal, after his poorly received interview with Siddhu. Photos of Parsons had been posted on social media from time to time. He had grown a beard and started to wear a baseball cap. In some photos, he’d looked gaunt. Now, he looked like a close replica of the version of himself that had won the election.
According to Parsons, the vaccine would be freely distributed not only at hospitals, but also at community centres and libraries. Under Canadian law, immunization was not mandatory. An awareness campaign was being launched with print, internet, and billboard advertising. Door-to-door canvassing was an option still under consideration.
A question period followed. One reporter asked him whether he would go through with his anti-poverty measures. He said he would risk his remaining political capital on it. He refused to answer a single question about the scandal but shook his head briskly and said, “I’ve apologized to the city in a press release and to my family in private, but I’ll also do it now. I am sorry. The thing I’ve learned through my own personal downfall is how little it matters in a larger context. I hid in shame for the first months of this disease because of these reports. I should have snapped out of it earlier and helped. I should have used my power and privilege to help the people of Vancouver instead of wallowing in my own misery. Suffering is not equally distributed. Some people—namely, the oppressed—have suffered more than others. And I will fight for them. Next question.”
Castello leaned over to Rieux and spoke in a whisper. “It was his idea to do this press conference,” she said.
“The people who hate him will continue to feel that way,” Rieux said. “And the people who lost faith in him—do they care?”
“He wants to talk to you—about what, I can’t tell you. Do you have a minute?”
Rieux had to wait while Romeo Parsons offered his cheekbones for selfies. Even after his misconduct, he was still wanted in photos. The mayor noticed Rieux’s impatience and made his last photo quick. He then pulled the doctor aside and thanked him for his efforts with the Sanitation League. “I want to be a volunteer,” he told Rieux, then immediately added, “and this isn’t a publicity stunt.”
Rieux did not habitually turn away volunteers, but he felt a strong urge to break from this practice now. “I want to like you,” he said. “And I didn’t vote for the other guy. I didn’t vote at all.” Parsons began to speak, but Rieux held up his hand. “This is not about your personal business,” the doctor told him. “It’s because I don’t think your idea of suffering is grounded in reality.” Rieux added that he believed the mayor’s intentions were good but that his remarks betrayed an intellectual superficiality. “It’s hard for me to explain,” he said. “Let me show you.”
Before he took Parsons into the ward, they had to change into hazmat suits. Parsons stepped into the gear tentatively. He seemed more worried about leaving his handmade Italian shoes in the change area than what he would see next.
Rieux could only admit afterward to his cruelty. He had taken a dislike to Parsons after the speech he gave following the riots. To Rieux, his remarks had been divisive. By claiming that the disease had somehow enacted karmic payback on the rich, he was saying that some people deserved to die. By contrast, the mayor’s own downfall, the consequence of a poor personal decision, he’d attributed to a rare psychological phenomenon, which allowed him to sidestep blame.
The mayor, Rieux believed, had also invoked the history of smallpox in the region gratuitously. He had invoked au courant ideology to explain an unprecedented event because he wanted to blame the affluent ones for their disease instead of considering its randomness. (The authors of this chronicle do not necessarily agree with Rieux’s interpretation of the mayor’s intent.) The doctor had somewhat blunted himself from feeling, but he knew about the types of suffering that hobbled bystanders. And he felt a pain dig into his own side whenever he stopped working; it opened its mouth and spat misery. He knew what he was doing to Parsons.
Rieux led the mayor down a corridor of partitions. The ward resembled a tent city—or a peculiar art class. Each partition contained another student artist’s slightly different take on the same scene.
Tucked away in one room were ten hospital beds set aside for infected children. There was extra room for parents. Some slept on mats beside their child’s bed. Rieux and Parsons reached the bed of a four-year-old girl. Her parents sat slumped over in chairs on opposite sides of the bed. The mother slept soundly. The father, who looked like he was tasting something bitter as he slept, briefly stirred and opened his eyes at the sound of his child’s whimpering. He closed them again.
“She was brought in twenty-four hours ago by her mother,” Rieux said quietly. “Her father came in shortly afterward. She has not responded to treatment.”
The doctor pulled over an empty chair from another partition. “If you want to understand what’s going on in this city that you lead, I want you to stay in this seat until it’s over,” he instructed the mayor. “If you still think you want to volunteer after this, then we will be pleased to take you on.” Rieux did not tell Parsons that he was the only volunteer who had to undergo this test.
The doctor had witnessed the deaths of children since he began work in the auxiliary hospital. He mentioned this facet of his job only once to his friends, saying it was the most difficult part. But Rieux minimized his own distress by de-particularizing those deaths, slotting them into a category—“the worst ones,” the patients who were the most “emotionally taxing.” He used those words as stoppers for his bottled emotions.
Last year, he’d reread parts of The Brothers Karamazov. He didn’t have the energy to go through the whole book, which he’d first consumed one vacant winter as an undergrad. Now he summoned his own memory of the Grand Inquisitor section, just before Ivan’s allegorical tale in conversation with his sensitive brother Alyosha. Ivan insisted something to the effect that he could not accept the harmony of God and the universe if it included the torture of children. What remained in Rieux’s mind was that he did not go so far as to deny God by insisting on disharmony. Rieux himself didn’t want to accept pointlessness—and the ensuing pursuit of gratified appetites—because of a child’s pain.
The authors of this piece (who shall be revealed soon) have, up until now, refrained from describing the deaths of children. They were not consequential to the stories of the figures we’ve followed. We are aware that the suffering of children can be acutely difficult and may prompt, among readers of this history, their own troubling memories. For some parents it might incite a painful consideration of their own worst fears.
We feel that the following episode merited inclusion. We are aware that the suffering can’t be entirely glossed over. We agonized over how best to describe this material. One of the authors suggested leaving a blank page in place of an account, which another dismissed as a “trite gimmick.” We decided, in the end, to neither dwell on nor gloss over this child’s death.
We therefore kindly invite those who might feel most sensitively about this material to either skip the remainder of this chapter or read it at arm’s length.
The mayor agreed not to leave his place at the foot of the girl’s bed until she died. He made a call to his assistant to clear his schedule and then turned off his phone.
The little girl had roused herself awake. Her arms were folded across her chest, one hand over a fist. She started shaking wildly. Rieux held the child down by the arms while he hushed her. He and Parsons heard a clunk as something rolled onto the floor. Parsons reached down and picked up a metal yo-yo. He rolled the thread back into the axle.
First the father, then the mother stood as the child continued to convulse. They were surprised to see Parsons with them but accepted his explanation. He realized that the mother and father were on opposite sides of the bed intentionally. Neither of them spoke to Rieux. When he’d offered his prognosis, they looked at him as if they’d been slapped.
The child did not seem calmed by the presence of her parents. She did not seem aware of them. Her eyes did figure eights in the chalky light. Then she shut her eyes, relaxed her arms, and fell into an agitated half-sleep. Her jaw remained clenched, and she periodically grimaced.
Both of Rose’s parents understood that their child was gravely ill, that she was likely to perish. They had fallen into a trance of pre-mourning and panic—a state that many Vancouverites experienced in those days. The child’s calmer state briefly snapped them out of that condition.
“What have you been doing for the last couple of months?” the mother, Lisa Randall-Oishi, asked Parsons during one of these lulls.
“I was still working but not in public,” he said. “There was personal stuff too. I had to move.”
“Are you in a hotel?” Jeffrey Oishi asked.
“The townhouse version of a sad bachelor apartment,” he said. “The assistant city manager loaned it to me. She’s living with her boyfriend. It forced him to commit”
This was perhaps the only moment of levity that day.
Rieux left Parsons for a couple of hours as he attended to other patients. When he returned, Parsons was alone with the child, holding her hand as she tossed her head from side to side on the pillow. Her parents had gone for dinner during a lull, but a new wave of fever was striking her. Her mouth opened as though she wanted to swallow something in front of her. Then it moved as though she wanted to speak, but no sound came. She gritted her teeth again and her body stiffened. She threw her arms and legs out like she was fighting a phantom.
The mayor looked to Rieux in disbelief. It was not only hard to watch—it was too much to watch. This girl’s frantic movements and voiceless moans did not correspond with his expectations of death, even a painful hospital death.
The wave of fever subsided, and the child rolled to one side of the bed. She clutched her yo-yo and a stuffed Arctic seal. She pushed away her blanket. Parsons pulled it back, and the smell of her sticky sweat filled their noses.
Rieux knew the wait wouldn’t be much longer. He left to eat a muffin. When he returned, Rose Oishi’s bed was surrounded. Her parents had rejoined Parsons, and Dr Orla Castello was now there too. Rieux did not want to think poorly of her presence around grieving parents. She could empathize with them, but there was also a part of her that eagerly greeted newly bereaved parents to her own state of brokenness. She would talk them through the first few moments so she could relive them herself.
Elyse sometimes accused him of being cynical, and this was another moment when he wished she was wrong. And yet, he was not self-aware enough to understand that his own motivations with Parsons—to prove him wrong in the most devastating fashion possible—were the same.
He looked at Castello and saw that the time was approaching. Rose struggled under her covers again, then tossed them away from her. She turned over and drew her knees to her face in a fetal position. She raised her head, her neck stretched, and started to move her eyes. New tears had filled them. Suddenly, she screamed.
The parents said something to Rieux, but he couldn’t remember what they said or what he said back. They moved around pointlessly, taking turns sobbing on one another. A nurse came into the room and they calmed themselves again.
Rose Oishi was quiet through most of the evening. Throughout this time, there had been a din of groaning and sobbing from other rooms that regular visitors had to ignore. Rose Oishi’s scream was clear as glass and had the effect of dishes crashing onto the floor of a busy restaurant and silencing the room.
When she finished screaming, she turned onto her back. It was now a little past one in the morning. Her eyes sharpened into focus and she looked at her mother and father for a handful of hollow breaths. Her fingers clutched the railing of the bed before they slipped. She arched her back, then slumped onto the bed.
It seemed like everyone around that bed and in that room had waited for her scream to end. The din in the room returned. The parents, who had braced themselves against her bed, commenced their wailing. Castello poised herself to console them.
Rieux watched Romeo Parsons, who looked up into the fluorescent lights and then back at the body of the newly deceased child. He was like Leontius in Plato’s Republic, who could not resist the urge to gape at recently executed bodies by a wall. “There, ye wretches,” he says, addressing his own two eyes, “take your fill of the fine spectacle!” Each time Parsons’ eyes returned to the dead girl, the more they dimmed. Rieux did not need to tell him that this child was not responsible for her own death.
The doctor realized what it meant to have never had children. He had wanted them with Elyse and knew they would consume his life. But the love parents had for their defenceless children was still an abstraction for him. Parsons, by contrast, had children. Rieux already knew that. But he would have known just by looking at Parsons’ face then.
The mayor turned to Rieux and spoke in a froggy voice. “I’ve passed your test,” he said. “Let me know when the first shift begins.”