When the reopening was announced, Rieux booked a ticket back to Hong Kong for his mother. Mrs Rieux had begun to sigh at the pictures of her growing grandchildren recently sent by his sister. She had been here too long. “I imagine Elyse will be home soon,” she told him. “I don’t want to get in her way.”
Rieux resolved to spend more time with his mother now that an end-date to her visit came into sight. She was at the age when any visit could be her last and he would only be able to see her in Hong Kong, where he found it difficult to breathe in the smog and heat.
He received two tickets from the Cantonese Opera troupe. The actress whom Rieux had attended to had recovered and regained her strength. To celebrate their imminent departure and to show their appreciation to the city, the company would stage a farewell performance before they travelled home to China. Rieux and his mother were invited backstage afterward.
“Once was enough,” Mrs Rieux said. “You don’t even like the opera!”
“It was my fault. I didn’t put in the time to understand it,” he explained. “I read about this one.”
She nodded. She wanted to go. “Thank you, Bernard,” she said.
The performance took place in the same theatre, but this time the house was full. Since the reopening had been announced, pedestrians filled the streets to the curb and passengers on buses stood shoulder-to-shoulder. People behaved as though they were already free. Rieux was reminded of visiting less temperate Canadian cities in the spring and seeing shirtless joggers running alongside towering snowbanks that had only begun to thaw. Vancouverites would have looked the same way to outsiders: like maniacs.
He flipped through the program. The original version of The Peony Pavilion, written at the end of the sixteenth century, consisted of fifty-five scenes and took days to perform. This popular adaptation, which featured eight scenes, lasted only for an evening.
The lights dimmed on a stage that was made to look like a garden. The actress he had treated stood in the green light. Her cheekbones seemed to jut out more noticeably, but it was hard to tell in her makeup. She played the lead character, a young woman named Du Liniang, and was followed onto the stage by another woman, who played her maid. To Rieux’s relief, this performance was subtitled.
Du Liniang comes from a wealthy family, which confines her to the estate and the manicured gardens that surround it to preserve her innocence. In her boredom and sadness, she wanders outside and falls asleep. In a dream she meets a man named Liu Mengmei, who convinces her that they are destined to fall in love. She wakes up from her dream, dismayed it wasn’t real. In her despair, she wastes away and dies.
Three years later, a scholar stops at a temple to get away from a snowstorm. He presents an offering to a painting of a young woman. He sees his own name, Liu Mengmei, within the poem that accompanies the portrait.
Du Liniang’s ghost appears. She tells him about their fated love and instructs him to unearth her tomb. The god of the underworld has allowed her to return to life and re-unite with her lover. Since it is a comic opera, they must succeed in proving to everyone—the cemetery custodians, her parents, the Emperor—that he is not a graverobber and she is not a ghost. And that they belong together.
Rieux’s mother was again stirred and delighted. The story was a comedy along Renaissance lines: not a lot of yuks, but an expression of vitality. Life has more good parts than bad ones … let’s end this story on a high note.
Mrs Rieux sang along to the songs—audibly. She did not even feign resistance when he suggested they go backstage. Once there, she clung to her son’s side as they waited to congratulate the performers. She offered the same crooked smiled she used when she’d met the parents of Rieux’s classmates and was embarrassed to speak in English. One actress noticed a trace of an accent in her Cantonese and asked her about her family’s hometown. “We come from the same village!” the actress gasped.
The doctor’s mother sighed contentedly during the drive home. As a child, Rieux often discovered her asleep on the couch, her arms cinched around a pillow that he always imagined to be a stand-in for his father. It was a fanciful notion. His mother hardly talked about her husband. It seemed difficult to imagine how deeply his parents had fallen in love when they could barely speak the same language.
Rieux was pleased by her reaction to The Peony Pavilion. While he found himself drifting in and out of the performance, it would not be fair to say that it had left him unaffected. Throughout the opera and the ride home, his mind latched onto the idea of lovers existing outside of time and space. Wasn’t it simply a fanciful notion rooted in anguish?
People fell in love at the wrong time, all the time.
People fell in love out of time, all the time.
The city was full of people still in love with ghosts. Always, but now more than ever. And ghosts waiting to be reborn and reunited.
For Rieux, his days at the clinic swung so far back in the direction of normalcy that it felt like another type of abnormal. During the quarantine, Rieux had noticed not only a drop in volume, but an outright reluctance in patients with everyday ailments and chronic conditions to come in. No one wanted to go to the doctor unless they feared their lives were at risk. With the reopening of the city in sight, his office was crowded with patients with asthma or hepatitis C.
Rieux completed one day at the clinic with his favourite patient, Walter, whom he saw for the first time since Rieux had visited his home. He noticed that Walter had added another band of red marks to his arm as the days of quarantine continued. As idle chatter during the exam, the doctor asked Walter whether he had any trips planned for after the reopening. Walter told him that he’d had been evicted from his apartment. He had a week to find a new home at a fixed price range or stay in a shelter.
“Things were better when everyone was afraid—they were too busy to hurt me,” Walter said. “Now that everyone is returning to normal, it’s back to survival mode.”
Rieux didn’t know what to say. He placed one hand on Walter’s arm and held it. Afterwards, he renewed his prescription for medication to treat hypertension. He would take more time with Walter if he needed it. Rieux had gotten behind with waiting patients a few times that day, which cut into his break and lunch. He blamed the end-of-day fatigue on his lack of rest and food.
“You look pale,” Walter told the doctor when he uncuffed the blood pressure monitor. “Drink some milk.”
Back home, he told Mrs Rieux that he was tired from his work day and she shouldn’t worry. He admitted later that he had been feeling weak for the past several days, but Tso and Grossman were expected for dinner that night. They needed to distribute leftover money that had been donated to the Sanitation League, and there were several options to be discussed. Rieux remained in bed until woken by his mother, then changed back into his clothes and sat slumped on the couch, a cup of warm water in his hands, while his mother prepared the meal.
His guests arrived. Grossman yelped upon encountering Rieux and his ashy complexion. “Doc, you’re not looking good,” she told him. “Let me show you.” She took his flash photo on her Samsung Galaxy and presented him with the image. “We need to take you to the hospital.”
Even as Rieux suggested that it could be “just the flu,” he realized how he sounded. When he stood up, he felt dizzy. He saw his bag by the door and staggered toward it. He removed a white plastic stick that looked like a home pregnancy test. Grossman helped him to the bathroom.
“We’ll know for sure in fifteen minutes,” he said when he returned to the living room.
He held the stick in both hands. Everyone watched the clock, repeating the same thought, It has to be the flu. It doesn’t make sense to get it now. A red line appeared over the positive sign. His eyes lidded, and he began to blink erratically.
“It’s true,” he said. “It’s true.”
An ambulance was called. Tso accompanied Mrs Rieux, who remained in her son’s field of vision at all times, to the hospital. He was sent directly from the Emergency Room to the Intensive Care Unit, where he was given the new antibiotics that were more effective in treating patients during the recent rounds of the disease. He slowly took in the room, the monitors, the lines attached to him. Seeing that everything was in place allowed him to relax.
“What’s my prognosis?” he asked Tso.
Mrs Rieux looked to Tso.
“I’m not a doctor,” Tso said.
“That’s why I like you.”
He closed his eyes and slept. It was past ten o’clock. Tso told Mrs Rieux to go home. She assured her that she would remain by her son’s side. Who knew how long it would last? Tso called Grossman and asked her to drive the doctor’s mother home. She knew Mrs Rieux needed to rest.
Tso pulled up her chair and scrolled through social media on her iPhone. She needed to save battery life in case Mrs Rieux called. Rieux slept with his head to the side. His legs were almost hairless. They were strong and lean, like statuary—his arms, too. Her eyes darted past the egg-shaped lumps that had formed on the sides of his neck. He had a scar under his eyebrow, a white horizontal line. She’d never gotten around to asking him about it.
Nurses came and went. She was too worried to ask the doctors anything. Dr Castello stopped by—as a visitor—and told Tso that Rieux was being treated for both the bubonic and pneumonic versions of the disease. He had been exposed to the illness for months. Why now? Was it possible for his body to have resisted it until he completed his work? Tso wondered.
Castello said she would visit again and left. She seemed uncomfortable with Rieux as a patient. An hour passed. Tso closed her eyes. By the time they fluttered open, another three hours had vanished.
Rieux had been making a whimpering sound. People afflicted with the disease typically flailed and screamed. Rieux suffered the way he lived: he was reserved, still, stoic. He kept his arms by his side and his jaw set.
His eyes remained fixed ahead as though he were a tightrope walker unwilling to look at the ground. Tso moved to the side of the bed and leaned over so he could see her face. His pupils slowly adjusted. With great effort, he wrenched his mouth out of a pained wince. If he couldn’t force a smile, he was able to create an unflappable expression.
“Where’s my mother?” he asked.
“Janice drove her home. I told her to get some rest.”
He closed his eyes. “That’s good. I’m thirsty.”
She offered him water from a cup, guiding the straw onto his colourless bottom lip. He thanked her. He began to say something but let out a moan. He tried again, with the same result. She realized that he only wanted to talk so he could hear other voices. She pulled up her chair and began to speak. First, she related the plotline of a TV show she’d watched the other night. One character reminded her of Siddhu. She relayed details of her last conversation with the reporter. She wished she had a book she could read to Rieux.
He fell asleep. She drifted off too and woke up when Mrs Rieux arrived. Grossman followed her into the room with a bag that contained family photos and the iPhone charger that Tso had requested. Rieux was awake and looked comfortable. He had adjusted the bed so he was sitting upright.
“It’s just a lull,” he told them.
Rieux spoke as though he were holding an invisible stopwatch as he raced through his instructions. He explained that he wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered into the water at Locarno Beach. He did not want a funeral service. His will was located in a safety deposit box at his bank. He left some money for his mother’s care, but the rest would go to Elyse. There was also a small life insurance policy.
He plowed through these orders, ignoring Tso and Mrs Rieux’s repeated pleas to relax. Rieux glared at Tso and told her she needed to write down his instructions. He could still make people do things. She removed her pen and some scrap paper from her bag. Finally, Rieux added, he needed Tso to contact Elyse.
After the instructions were recorded, he relaxed. He asked his mother for water, then sipped it slowly from a straw.
Tso’s iPhone was giving out. Grossman handed her the cellphone charger in a bag that also contained a notebook along with other hastily gathered items. Tso had seen Rieux jotting in the notebook in his car, and she’d noticed it on his dining-room table but had never been curious about its contents until she held it in her hands.
She flipped it open and saw their names. “What is this?” Tso asked Rieux.
He grimaced. “A hobby.”
“Why do you refer to everyone by their last name?” she asked.
“To be impartial.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t work.”
Rieux told her not to read it. He was not done yet. He feared that he wouldn’t ever be done. “Someone needs to tell it,” he told her. “Otherwise it will recede in memory. The way we forget everything. You should write it.”
She frowned in dismay. “I would turn it into something else. Raymond would want to look at it too.” He reached for the notebook, trying to take it back. In doing so, he dragged one of the lines from the machine. “This part with Siddhu, for instance—”
Mrs Rieux had a way of innocently interrupting others. Since her command of English was basic, she often tuned out conversations and forgot to wait for a proper break in a chat before voicing a thought.
“Megan,” she said in Cantonese, “you should go home and rest.” She took the notebook from her. “I will keep this for now.”
Tso walked back to Grossman’s house. She was relieved to have shed her latex gloves, which irritated her skin. She removed her face mask and took in the moist air. A heavy rain had fallen the night before, warming the ground. At Grossman’s, she showered, changed, and ate a sandwich. She had never gotten around to charging her phone. When she returned to the hospital, Rieux’s face was obscured by a respirator. His eyes widened when he saw her. She saw his lips moving. He began to cough. She went to the bed and took his hand.
His fingers looked as though they’d been powdered in coal dust.
“He started babbling shortly after you left,” Grossman explained. Her eyes were swollen. “Then he started coughing. There was blood.”
He looked like someone riding a roller coaster. His other hand was by his side, balled into a fist. He looked ahead into the distance, beyond the room’s glass partition, as though he was gaping at some great drop that he was inching toward.
They tried their best to soothe him. Mrs Rieux wiped his brow with a towel. Tso held her hand over his on the railing. Grossman played music from his iPhone: singer-songwriters with acoustic guitars and harmonicas—Bob Dylan and the Band, Richie Havens, the McGarrigle sisters, Hayden, and Gillian Welch.
Tso had researched end-of-life ceremonies for her book, and during her stint with the Sanitation League, she’d joined hands with family members and priests in prayers and last rites for the dying. She wished that they, if not Rieux himself, could have taken comfort in these rituals. She knew they would be an affront to him.
A doctor came and consulted with a nurse. They decided that Rieux required heavy sedation. His medication was increased, and soon he slumped in rest. She looked at one monitor. She needed a nurse to explain that his blood pressure was dangerously low.
Tso and Grossman decided they should eat. They made salad bar plates and bought bottled water in the cafeteria, then sat by the windows that looked out on a set of grey concrete apartment buildings.
“I don’t think he’s going to make it,” Grossman said.
Tso looked down at her lap. “He’s fighting. I wish I were more optimistic.”
“This is triggering memories of my dad. Only this is worse. Maybe it’s worse because it’s happening now.”
Rieux spent the rest of the day unconscious. His hands grew as dark as eggplants as the infection grew.
“We need to let him pass,” Castello said when she came at ten. “He knew what the risks were. I don’t think he expected to last through it all.”
Grossman took Mrs Rieux back home. Tso remained in a chair. She was supposed to call them should his condition take its final turn.
Tso was woken up by a howling sound. Rieux’s eyes were open but unfocused. She rose and took his blackened hand, but he did not respond to her presence. He shrugged away from her and rolled to his side. He made a noise that grew thinner as the air left his watery lungs for the last time. And then the noise stopped, like a string on a musical instrument that had snapped.
Tso called Grossman, who had stayed with Mrs Rieux. They arrived quickly, as though they had been waiting in another room. It was not yet six o’clock in the morning and still dark outside. The three women wept over Rieux with all the energy they had reserved. They knew this would be the last person they needed to mourn. There was nothing to hold back. Mrs Rieux addressed him by all his childhood pet names, stroking his hair. With all the regret of someone who had withheld a desire until the opportunity had passed, Tso yearned to embrace Mrs Rieux.
She remembered her own mother’s funeral for the first time in a quarter century. Her mother lay in an open casket, eyes closed, and Tso saw with a surprise that she was wearing makeup. This was not her mother, and yet when they closed the casket, Tso needed to be held back from it.
Rieux’s body was already starting to stiffen, but Tso ran her latex-covered fingers over his knee. She cupped his upper arm and brushed his cheek.
And then Tso kissed him through her face mask. A nurse walked in and screamed at her to stop.