Yellow Jack
Fiction by Fraser Calderwood
“We must love one another or die.” — WH Auden, 1939
“We must love one another and die.” — WH Auden, 1955
Two rows in front of us, the guy kept tying and re-tying the laces of his Dakota steel-toes, tucking and re-tucking the hems of his sweatpants into each boot. Not even tight — just getting them even. When the bus squealed to a stop, he stood and clomped around the aisle. Seeing if they were right for the day’s work, I presumed.
It was easy to forget there was still work being done, out in the world — snow-crusted southern Alberta and beyond. The guy looked rectangular and invulnerable, not at all like someone going to Consignment. Didn’t look down enough, or hopeful enough. Every time he stood he scrutinized Jesse and me. Judging whether we were going to Consignment, or were safe, I thought. They distrusted you even when you were just going to retrieve some- one. I didn’t blame them. We knew so little then.
A banner above our heads promised “Brights to Cure the Winter Blahs” — models in bold solids with bioluminescent smiles and multiracial pals. Faintly above the engine whoosh I could hear sobbing. Jesse nodded to indicate a woman across the aisle, folded up on herself. Others looked too. It was impossible to know if a person was distraught for their own reasons — there were plenty of reasons — or if it was a sign of the illness. You could see her thumb in the pages of a novel, so we looked away, ashamed of our suspicion. I stole another look at her. I had read that novel and she didn’t look nearly heartbroken enough, honestly.
No one really knew what to look for.
I didn’t read much before I met Patrice. We met almost as soon as I arrived from Port- land, where I’d been sort of living. There were all sorts of problems down there. I had been so cynical for such a spell that the discovery that I could feel this much giddiness over a person was like stumbling on an extinct species, alive and well — something nobody had seen in years, like a right whale or a rhinoceros. It felt unnatural.
Honestly, I don’t know what drew her to me. Sure, I had stories to tell — mostly of failure. Whatever show of goodness I’d fooled her with, I strained to be that person for real.
The bus braked unexpectedly and my chin smacked the seat in front. Luckily the vinyl not the metal. We were a ways short of a stop, but I guess the woman who darted in front couldn’t stand to wait for the next bus in this cold.
“Trying to get hit,” the driver rebuked her as the woman hurdled the snow-bank to get onboard. She looked solid and spring-loaded and like she could have vaulted over a bus if it came to it.
“There’re worse ways to go,” she said. She grinned at each of us as she clambered to an open row, as if she were a minor local celebrity. I guess she was, among passengers of this bus who had seen her elude death — very minor and very local. The guy in the steel-toed boots glowered at her as well.
I wondered how many stops to the Consignment. We had undergone so many interviews and tests, but it would be worth it to see Patrice. Patrice really believed in things; she was earnest. Principally she believed in art, in words. In Alberta no matter what you loved, we grew up knowing we’d work in oil. Almost none of those jobs were left when I returned from Portland. Patrice said you couldn’t automate art — not really — so there’d always be work for her.
First she only recommended. I’d tell her some idea I had while scrounging food, a shard of a dream, and she’d say, “There’s an Auden poem of that exact thing,” or “You dreamed a Carmen Maria Machado story,” or “Think it’s time you read Toni Morrison.” Then she was handing me armloads to carry back to the squat. Then, when I’d carted the bulk of her books to my high bedroom, she said it was simpler for her to move in than for me to return them. Another time I might have hesitated. I’d lived with partners before; Patrice hadn’t. When you live with a lover you breathe them. Their soap, their sweat, their sloughed-off skin: you invite this dust into your lungs. But Patrice already inhabited the space inside my ribcage. And we were sure we were all going to die anyway.
No one knew if it came from melting permafrost. The thaw was just happening at the same time. The Globe reported biological warfare, but had to retract the story. When Jesse showed up at our house he brought rumours of gene-editing, a flu virus subtly modified. The spread accidental.
Around us the city thinned out. Next stop, steel-toe guy stomped back to our row and stood over us. Jesse and I showed no affection in public. Just some nights. The word quarantine comes from making the crews of ships wait forty days to come ashore during the Black Death. It had been longer since they’d taken Patrice. She’d understand my need after such a wait.
I struggled to think of something to say to Jesse so the guy wouldn’t accost us. Did we look like the type of people who caught it? The window above Jesse was caked in snow and gravel and the beet juice they poured to stop ice forming. “Looks like they disinfected everything with iodine,” I said.
“More like dried blood,” said Jesse. “They announce the stop for the Consignment?” the guy busted in.
We both hesitated, looked at our own boots and our anxious hands and the pattern of the metal on the back of the seat in front of us.
“My dad,” the guy squeezed out. Then, “If they don’t know all the symptoms, how will we know they’ve recovered?” The muscles of his face pulled so tight you could have made pencil rubbings of his skull.
“We only know what they told us,” answered Jesse.
The Consignment was the terminus, we learned. We’d be taking the same bus back. If Calgary was a world, where we unloaded was a distant moon — the side of the high- way in the parking lot of what used to be a Petro Canada. The driver penguined across the ice to one of the Alberta Health sheds, to get whatever tests they could give him. We all peered at the other shed where we assumed the patients would emerge. Flapping over it were the flag of Alberta and the yellow jack — two yellow squares, two black — that signaled quarantine. The winter sky was utterly clear and the same cold blue as one of those mountain lakes that flash-freeze. The sun was cheerless and you noticed its warmth only when you were out of it.
Ironically, the first one of us to wipe out was the steel-toe guy. He set off quick across the field before they lowered the yellow jack. Whatever was happening to the climate of the rest of the earth, there’d hardly been Chinook winds for several winters. The merciful periods of lesser cold were not enough to melt away the snows. Rather, they wet the surface of everything before it tempered into a shiny carapace. The Dakota boots shot up in the air and he slid down the slight bowl to where the ground flattened out. The rest of us watched the yellow jack snapping like a whip over the shed.
“When they gonna bring her out?” begged the woman who almost died.
When the flag lowered we were to walk to the middle of the field. The line was marked with wooden stakes, and at the top of each flapped a neon plastic ribbon. The patients would be ushered out to meet us in this open space, like ransoming hostages. We didn’t know if it was a precaution or just ritual.
“I heard they have a cure and they’re testing it on quarantines,” said the same woman. No one responded. We’d all heard rumours. We stood there holding onto our own fears. The wind kicked up ice pebbles at us.
I can’t even tell you how much elation you are capable of feeling from so small a thing: the squeak of a pulley on a flagpole. The patients seemed to approach slower than I thought they should. Like they were reluctant to return to normal life — or what we were accepting as normal. Possibly the doc- tors warned them not to exert themselves. I don’t recall if Patrice looked any different when she appeared in the severe light and came toward us. Probably she looked rough, coming straight from the Lazaret. Or maybe they were better taken care of than we were on the outside. In the wait — I can’t say it was endless only because it did end — Jesse grabbed my hand, and pulsed when we first glimpsed her. Patrice looked at our hands — in our identical shoplifted coats our arms looked grafted together — and smiled understandingly. When she knew they were going to take her, she told us to look after one another.
What does a person say at such a reunion? Probably Patrice just said “Hi” and I just said “Hi,” in the same bright little voices in which we always said “Hi” in the moment after some miraculous intimate act when our eyes would pop open and take in the other’s face — only now we were in public.
The return journey was quiet, everyone holding loved ones. I didn’t notice if every patient had someone meeting them, or if we all got the loved ones we’d traveled to collect. I don’t know if I would have heard protest. Would someone have been desperate enough to rush the sheds? Would the RCMP have drawn weapons? I noticed only the particular soft firmness of Patrice’s body against me on the seat. We pressed close, disgusting like teens, my chest absorbing the sharp wings of her shoulders.
Out the window, Jesse’s eyes followed far- off hills. He’d come in from somewhere near Morley and I wondered if he thought it would have been safer out there than with us in Calgary. Patrice used to joke about him coming to our bed, but it was only in her absence that I went to him. Of course there’d been men when I was down the coast, but Jesse meant a bit more.
Later, when we got to the house where we were staying, Jesse gave us space. He was always checking Twitter for the progress of the illness. The range of its diffusion. A Reddit user theorized it struck women, artists, queers. I wondered if that was who got it or just who reflected on themselves enough to spot symptoms. A news outlet in London named it The Despair, so that’s what we called it. For a year or so doctors mistook it for depression. At this time they had not yet isolated the pathogen, what virus or parasite, limbic or endocrine.
Patrice and I talked about anything but that. Somehow we still came back to death. “At the Lazaret,” Patrice said, “there was a woman from California. A biologist. She told me about all the sea stars dying. They dissolve, basically. Arms fall off. The ocean warmed up and this disease got all of them, so many that the whole coastline changed. The sea stars used to eat urchins. Without them the urchins ate all the kelp. The ocean there is all dead now.” She was looking at me but not in my eyes.
When I studied Patrice I didn’t know what symptoms I was looking for. From what the doctors told Jesse and me, anything could be a symptom. Sufferers got fevers, swollen lymph nodes. Some woke with a paralysis that had no physiological explanation. Some went fast, from perfectly content — or as good as you could be in such a time — to their bodies just shutting down. Numbness was a symptom. Not only obvious melancholy, but also its absence, could be suspect.
All perished.
I never thought Patrice would catch it. She had such a sense of mission in what she did
— which was writing, and teaching writing — up until they took her. Sure, I’d had jobs, but nothing that imbued me with such pur- pose. The school where she taught stayed open because there was no proof how the thing spread, but more and more parents kept their kids home.
It took people you expected and it swooped down on whom you least expected.
We were lying together on someone’s old bed and Patrice was running her hands down my body. So much of life as a man is a sealed compartment that it was astonishing to be touched so. The way she searched, found where was tender and where was unyielding
— no one had done that in my whole life. There was something she wanted to say. I was always waiting for her to say she wasn’t in love anymore. All your loves end as simply as that, until maybe one doesn’t. A feeling can just evaporate. Even despair, I hoped. “You picked a nice house this time,” she said, pushing her forehead into my chest.
What happened in Calgary was the further-out suburbs and the old centre were still inhabited, but in between hardly anyone was left. Before they took Patrice to the Lazaret, we’d squatted in a few different places; every house we hoped would be the one we could all be happy in. Some houses still had sun-bleached FOR SALE signs on the lawn, not even blown over. Doubtless some of the owners had caught the Despair. Who knew if it could live on in a house?
We looked out the window of this bed- room, where pink light covered everything. If we moved our heads up or down the glass warped our view. “Old windows like this,” I said, beaming, knowing a thing she didn’t know, “the top gets thinner and the bottom thicker. Real slow: the glass just flows down over time. It’s never really solid.” Or maybe there was nothing solid.
“I think the Lazaret was even older,” Patrice murmured. I don’t know if she meant to bring it up, or had drifted to it like a boat unmoored. “It wasn’t one building but a little town where no one lives anymore.” Her voice lowered at the end. I thought I heard Jesse coming up the stairs.
“Did they give you something?” I asked her at last. “I heard they’re testing a cure. Maybe they know what it is now. They did tests on us too. Took so many vials of blood I’m surprised I have any left.”
Patrice kissed my collarbone. She kissed my chin. She kissed where my earlobe met my jaw. When she started acting different — before — she still did these things, but each was a chore.
“They didn’t give us anything,” she said.
“What?” I said.
“They don’t know anything,” she breathed. “The tests — they said the tests were all to be sure our loved ones had it too. So we wouldn’t infect them.”
The last pink light drained from the window. »