3
JEEVAN WANDERED ALONE IN Allan Gardens. He let the cool light of the greenhouse draw him in like a beacon, snowdrifts halfway to his knees by now, the childhood pleasure of being the first to leave footprints. When he looked in he was soothed by the interior paradise, tropical flowers blurred by fogged glass, palm fronds whose shapes reminded him of a long-ago vacation in Cuba. He would go see his brother, he decided. He wanted very much to tell Frank about the evening, both the awfulness of Arthur’s death and the revelation that being a paramedic was the right thing to do with his life. Up until tonight he hadn’t been certain. He’d been searching for a profession for so long now. He’d been a bartender, a paparazzo, an entertainment journalist, then a paparazzo again and then once again a bartender, and that was just the past dozen years.
Frank lived in a glass tower on the south edge of the city, overlooking the lake. Jeevan left the park and waited awhile on the sidewalk, jumping up and down for warmth, boarded a streetcar that floated like a ship out of the night and leaned his forehead on the window as it inched along Carlton Street, back the way he had come. The storm was almost a whiteout now, the streetcar moving at a walking pace. His hands ached from compressing Arthur’s unwilling heart.
The sadness of it, memories of photographing Arthur in Hollywood all those years ago. He was thinking of the little girl, Kirsten Raymonde, bright in her stage makeup; the cardiologist kneeling in his gray suit; the lines of Arthur’s face, his last words—“The wren …”—and this made him think of birds, Frank with his binoculars the few times they’d been bird-watching together, Laura’s favorite summer dress which was blue with a storm of yellow parrots, Laura, what would become of them? It was still possible that he might go home later, or that at any moment she might call and apologize. He was almost back where he’d started now, the theater closed up and darkened a few blocks to the south.
The streetcar stopped just short of Yonge Street, and he saw that a car had spun out in the middle of the tracks, three people pushing while its tires spun in the snow. His phone vibrated again in his pocket, but this time it wasn’t Laura.
“Hua,” he said. He thought of Hua as his closest friend, though they rarely saw one another. They’d tended bar together for a couple of years just after
university while Hua studied for his MCAT and Jeevan tried unsuccessfully to establish himself as a wedding photographer, and then Jeevan had followed another friend to Los Angeles to take pictures of actors while Hua had gone off to medical school. Now Hua worked long hours at Toronto General.
“You been watching the news?” Hua spoke with a peculiar intensity.
“Tonight? No, I had theater tickets. Actually, you wouldn’t believe what happened, I—”
“Wait, listen, I need you to tell me honestly, will it send you into one of your panic attacks if I tell you something really, really bad?”
“I haven’t had an anxiety attack in three years. My doctor said that whole thing was just a temporary stress-related situation, you know that.”
“Okay, you’ve heard of the Georgia Flu?”
“Sure,” Jeevan said, “you know I try to follow the news.” A story had broken the day before about an alarming new flu in the Republic of Georgia, conflicting reports about mortality rates and death tolls. Details had been sketchy. The name the news outlets were going with—the Georgia Flu—had struck Jeevan as disarmingly pretty.
“I’ve got a patient in the ICU,” Hua said. “Sixteen-year-old girl, flew in from Moscow last night, presented with flu symptoms at the ER early this morning.”
Only now did Jeevan hear the exhaustion in Hua’s voice. “It’s not looking good for her. Well, by midmorning we’ve got twelve more patients, same symptoms, turns out they were all on the same flight. They all say they started feeling sick on the plane.”
“Relatives? Friends of the first patient?”
“No relation whatsoever. They all just boarded the same flight out of
Moscow.”
“The sixteen-year-old …?”
“I don’t think she’ll make it. So there’s this initial group of patients, the Moscow passengers. Then this afternoon, a new patient comes in. Same symptoms, but this one wasn’t on the flight. This one’s just an employee at the
airport.”
“I’m not sure what you’re—”
“A gate agent,” Hua said. “I’m saying his only contact with the other patients was speaking with one of them about where to board the hotel shuttle.”
“Oh,” Jeevan said. “That sounds bad.” The streetcar was still trapped behind the stuck car. “So I guess you’re working late tonight?”
“You remember the SARS epidemic?” Hua asked. “That conversation we
had?”
“I remember calling you from Los Angeles when I heard your hospital was quarantined, but I don’t remember what I said.”
“You were freaked out. I had to talk you down.”
“Okay, I guess I do remember that. But look, in my defense, they made it sound pretty—”
“You told me to call you if there was ever a real epidemic.”
“I remember.”
“We’ve admitted over two hundred flu patients since this morning,” Hua said.
“A hundred and sixty in the past three hours. Fifteen of them have died. The ER’s full of new cases. We’ve got beds parked in hallways. Health Canada’s about to make an announcement.” It wasn’t only exhaustion, Jeevan realized.
Hua was afraid.
Jeevan pulled the bell cord and made his way to the rear door. He found himself glancing at the other passengers. The young woman with groceries, the man in the business suit playing a game on his cell phone, the elderly couple conversing quietly in Hindi. Had any of them come from the airport? He was aware of all of them breathing around him.
“I know how paranoid you can get,” Hua said. “Believe me, you’re the last person I’d call if I thought it was nothing, but—” Jeevan banged the palm of his hand on the door’s glass pane. Who had touched the door before him? The driver glared over his shoulder, but let him out. Jeevan stepped into the storm and the doors swished shut behind him.
“But you don’t think it’s nothing.” Jeevan was walking past the stuck car, wheels still spinning uselessly in the snow. Yonge Street was just ahead.
“I’m certain it isn’t nothing. Listen, I have to get back to work.”
“Hua, you’ve been working with these patients all day?”
“I’m fine, Jeevan, I’ll be fine. I have to go. I’ll call you later.”
Jeevan put the phone in his pocket and walked on through the snow, turned south down Yonge Street toward the lake and the tower where his brother lived.
Are you fine, Hua my old friend, or will you be fine? He was deeply unsettled.
The lights of the Elgin Theatre just ahead. The interior of the theater was darkened now, the posters still advertising King Lear, with Arthur gazing up into blue light with flowers in his hair and the dead Cordelia limp in his arms. Jeevan stood for a while looking at the posters. He walked on slowly, thinking of Hua’s strange call. Yonge Street was all but deserted. He stopped to catch his breath in the doorway of a store that sold suitcases and watched a taxi ease its way slowly
down the unplowed street, the storm caught in its headlights, and this vision, snow in lights, transported him back for a moment into the stage-effect storm of the Elgin Theatre. He shook his head to dispel the image of Arthur’s blank stare and moved on in an exhausted daze, through the shadows and orange lights under the Gardiner Expressway to Toronto’s glassy southern edge.
The snowstorm was wilder down on Queens Quay, wind cutting across the lake. Jeevan had finally reached Frank’s building when Hua called again.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” Jeevan said. “Is it really—”
“Listen,” Hua said, “you have to get out of the city.”
“What? Tonight? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, Jeevan. That’s the short answer. I don’t know what’s going on.
It’s a flu, that much is obvious, but I’ve never seen anything like it. It is so fast.
It just seems to spread so quickly—”
“It’s getting worse?”
“The ER’s full,” Hua said, “which is a problem, because at this point half of
the ER staff are too sick to work.”
“They got sick from the patients?”
In the lobby of Frank’s building, the night doorman flipped through a newspaper, an abstract painting of gray and red lit up on the wall above and behind him, doorman and painting reflected in streaks on the polished floor.
“It’s the fastest incubation period I’ve ever seen. I just saw a patient, she works as an orderly here at the hospital, on duty when the first patients started coming in this morning. She started feeling sick a few hours into her shift, went home early, her boyfriend drove her back in two hours ago and now she’s on a ventilator. You get exposed to this, you’re sick within hours.”
“You think it’s going to spread outside the hospital …?” Jeevan was having some difficulty keeping his thoughts straight.
“No, I know it’s outside the hospital. It’s a full-on epidemic. If it’s spreading here, it’s spreading through the city, and I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“You’re saying I should—”
“I’m saying you should leave now. Or if you can’t leave, at least stock up on food and stay in your apartment. I have to make some more calls.” He hung up.
The night doorman turned a newspaper page. If it had been anyone other than Hua, Jeevan wouldn’t have believed it, but he had never known a man with a greater gift for understatement. If Hua said there was an epidemic, then epidemic wasn’t a strong enough word. Jeevan was crushed by a sudden certainty that this was it, that this illness Hua was describing was going to be the divide between a
before and an after, a line drawn through his life.
It occurred to Jeevan that there might not be much time. He turned away from Frank’s building and passed the darkened coffee shop on the pier, the tiny harbor filled with snow-laden pleasure boats, into the grocery store on the harbor’s other side. He stood just inside for a beat, blinking in the light. Only one or two other customers drifted through the aisles. He felt that he should call someone, but who? Hua was his only close friend. He’d see his brother in a few minutes.
His parents were dead, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to talk to Laura. He would wait until he got to Frank’s, he decided, he’d check the news when he got there, and then he’d go through the contacts on his phone and call everyone he knew.
There was a small television mounted above the film development counter, showing closed-captioned news. Jeevan drifted toward it. Shots of a broadcaster standing outside Toronto General in the snow, white text scrolling past her head.
Toronto General and two other local hospitals had been placed under isolation.
Health Canada was confirming an outbreak of the Georgia Flu. They weren’t releasing numbers at this time, but there had been fatalities and more information would be forthcoming. There were suggestions that Georgian and Russian officials had been somewhat less than transparent about the severity of the crisis there. Officials requested that everyone please try their best to stay calm.
Jeevan’s understanding of disaster preparedness was based entirely on action movies, but on the other hand, he’d seen a lot of action movies. He started with water, filled one of the oversized shopping carts with as many cases and bottles as he could fit. There was a moment of doubt on the way to the cash registers, straining against the weight of the cart—was he overreacting?—but he was committed, he’d decided, too late to turn back. The clerk raised an eyebrow.
“I’m parked just outside,” Jeevan said. “I’ll bring the cart back.” The clerk nodded, tired. She was young, early twenties probably, with dark bangs that she kept pushing out of her eyes. He forced the impossibly heavy cart outside and half-pushed, half-skidded through the snow at the exit. There was a ramp down into a small parklike arrangement of benches and planters. The cart gained speed on the incline, bogged down in deep snow and slid sideways into a planter.
It was eleven twenty. The supermarket closed in forty minutes. He was imagining how long it would take to bring the cart up to Frank’s apartment, to unload it, the time required for explanations and tedious reassurances of sanity before he could return to the grocery store for more supplies. Could there be any
harm in leaving the cart here for the moment? There was no one on the street. He called Hua on his way back into the store.
“What’s happening now?” Jeevan moved quickly through the store while Hua spoke. Another case of water—Jeevan was under the impression that one can never have too much—and then cans and cans of food, all the tuna and beans and soup on the shelf, pasta, anything that looked like it might last a while. The hospital was full of flu patients and the situation was identical at the other hospitals in the city. The ambulance service was overwhelmed. Thirty-seven patients had died now, including every patient who’d been on the Moscow flight and two ER nurses who’d been on duty when the first patients came in. Jeevan was standing by the cash register again, the clerk scanning his cans and packages. Hua said he’d called his wife and told her to take the kids and leave the city tonight, but not by airplane. The part of the evening that had transpired in the Elgin Theatre seemed like possibly a different lifetime. The clerk was moving very slowly. Jeevan passed her a credit card and she scrutinized it as though she hadn’t just seen it five or ten minutes ago.
“Take Laura and your brother,” Hua said, “and leave the city tonight.”
“I can’t leave the city tonight, not with my brother. I can’t rent a wheelchair van at this hour.”
In response there was only a muffled sound. Hua was coughing.
“Are you sick?” Jeevan was pushing the cart toward the door.
“Good night, Jeevan.” Hua disconnected and Jeevan was alone in the snow.
He felt possessed. The next cart was all toilet paper. The cart after that was more canned goods, also frozen meat and aspirin, garbage bags, bleach, duct tape.
“I work for a charity,” he said to the girl behind the cash register, his third or fourth time through, but she wasn’t paying much attention to him. She kept glancing up at the small television above the film development counter, ringing his items through on autopilot. Jeevan called Laura on his sixth trip through the store, but his call went to voice mail.
“Laura,” he began. “Laura.” He thought it better to speak to her directly and it was already almost eleven fifty, there wasn’t time for this. Filling another cart with food, moving quickly through this bread-and-flower-scented world, this almost-gone place, thinking of Frank in his twenty-second-floor apartment, high up in the snowstorm with his insomnia and his book project, his day-old New York Times and his Beethoven. Jeevan wanted desperately to reach him. He decided to call Laura later, changed his mind, and called the home line while he was standing by the checkout counter, trying to avoid making eye contact with
the clerk.
“Jeevan, where are you?” Laura sounded slightly accusatory. He handed over
his credit card.
“Are you watching the news?”
“Should I be?”
“There’s a flu epidemic, Laura. It’s serious.”
“That thing in Russia or wherever? I knew about that.”
“It’s here now. It’s worse than anyone thought. I’ve just been talking to Hua.
You have to leave the city.” He glanced up in time to see the look the checkout girl gave him.
“Have to? What? Where are you, Jeevan?” He was signing his name on the slip, struggling with the cart toward the exit, where the order of the store ended and the frenzy of the storm began. It was difficult to steer the cart with one hand.
There were already five carts parked haphazardly between benches and planters,
dusted now with snow.
“Just turn on the news, Laura.”
“You know I don’t like to watch the news before bed. Are you having a panic attack?”
“What? No. I’m going to my brother’s place to make sure he’s okay.”
“Why wouldn’t he be?”
“You’re not even listening. You never listen to me.” Jeevan knew this was a petty thing to say in the face of a probable flu pandemic, but couldn’t resist. He plowed the cart into the others and dashed back into the store. “I can’t believe you left me at the theater,” he said. “You just left me at the theater performing
CPR on a dead actor.”
“Jeevan, tell me where you are.”
“I’m in a grocery store.” It was eleven fifty-five. This last cart was all grace items: vegetables, fruit, bags of oranges and lemons, tea, coffee, crackers, salt, preserved cakes. “Look, Laura, I don’t want to argue. This flu’s serious, and it’s
fast.”
“What’s fast?”
“This flu, Laura. It’s really fast. Hua told me. It’s spreading so quickly. I think you should get out of the city.” At the last moment, he added a bouquet of
daffodils.
“What? Jeevan—”
“You’re healthy enough to get on an airplane,” he said, “and then you’re dead a day later. I’m going to stay with my brother. I think you should pack up now
and go to your mother’s place before everyone finds out and the roads get clogged up.”
“Jeevan, I’m concerned. This sounds paranoid to me. I’m sorry I left you at the theater, I just really had a headache and I—”
“Please turn on the news,” he said. “Or go read it online or something.”
“Jeevan, please tell me where you are, and I’ll—”
“Just do it, Laura, please,” he said, and then he hung up, because he was at the checkout counter for the last time now and the moment to talk to Laura had passed. He was trying so hard not to think about Hua.
“We’re about to close,” the clerk said.
“This is my last time through,” he told her. “You must think I’m a nut.”
“I’ve seen worse.” He’d scared her, he realized. She’d heard some of his phone calls, and there was the television with its unsettling news.
“Well, just trying to prepare.”
“For what?”
“You never know when something disastrous might happen,” Jeevan said.
“That?” She gestured toward the television. “It’ll be like SARS,” she said.
“They made such a big deal about it, then it blew over so fast.” She didn’t sound entirely convinced.
“This isn’t like SARS. You should get out of the city.” He’d only wanted to be truthful, perhaps to help her in some way, but he saw immediately that he’d made a mistake. She was scared, but also she thought he was insane. She stared flatly at him as she rang up the final few items and a moment later he was outside in the snow again, a goateed young man from the produce department locking the doors behind him. Standing outside with seven enormous shopping carts to transport through the snow to his brother’s apartment, soaked in sweat and also freezing, feeling foolish and afraid and a little crazy, Hua at the edge of every thought.
It took the better part of an hour to push the shopping carts one at a time through the snow and across his brother’s lobby and then maneuver them into the freight elevator, for unscheduled use of which Jeevan had to bribe the night doorman, and to move them in shifts up to the twenty-second floor. “I’m a survivalist,”
Jeevan explained.
“We don’t get too many of those here,” the doorman said.
“That’s what makes it such a good place for this,” Jeevan said, a little wildly.
“A good place for what?”
“For survivalism.”
“I see,” the doorman said.
Sixty dollars later Jeevan was alone outside his brother’s apartment door, the carts lined up down the corridor. Perhaps, he thought, he should have called ahead from the grocery store. It was one a.m. on a Thursday night, the corridor all closed doors and silence.
“Jeevan,” Frank said, when he came to the door. “An unexpected pleasure.”
“I …” Jeevan didn’t know how to explain himself, so he stepped back and gestured weakly at the carts instead of speaking. Frank maneuvered his wheelchair forward and peered down the hall.
“I see you went shopping,” Frank said.
