Songs for the End of the World Read online

  BOOKS BY SALEEMA NAWAZ

  Songs for the End of the World (2020)

  Bone and Bread (2013)

  Mother Superior (2008)

  Copyright © 2020 by Saleema Nawaz

  McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780771072574

  Ebook ISBN 9780771072581

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Book design by Lisa Jager

  Cover art: Alan Labisch/Unsplash

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v5.4

  a

  for those who have and share hope

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Books by Saleema Nawaz

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Timeline

  Social Web

  Publisher’s Note

  ELLIOT

  August 2020

  OWEN

  September 2009

  EDITH

  July 2020

  STU

  September 2004

  OWEN

  August 2020

  SARAH

  September 2020

  EMMA

  December 1999

  EMMA

  September 2020

  ELLIOT

  November 2020

  SARAH

  December 2016

  ELLIOT

  November 2020

  KEELAN

  November 2020

  ELLIOT

  November 2020

  EMMA

  November 2020

  ELLIOT

  December 2020

  SARAH and OWEN

  December 2020

  ELLIOT

  December 2020

  Acknowledgements

  An Interview with Author Saleema Nawaz

  Timeline detail left.

  Timeline detail right.

  Social Web.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This novel was written and revised between 2013 and 2019. The fictional virus in this book—its transmission, symptoms, and treatment, as well as the containment strategies, media coverage, and overall global response to it, including ethical and legal considerations—was informed by the author’s extensive research into computer modelling of infectious disease spread, the SARS, Ebola, and MERS-CoV outbreaks, and such historical pandemics as the Spanish Flu of 1918–1920. For more information, please see the Q&A with the author at the end of the book.

  This ebook edition was created on March 20, 2020.

  The end of the year is coming. A few miles offshore, Buona Fortuna drifts downwind on her sea anchor. The new year already seems tired.

  And onshore, the lights of a hospital. Men with guns guard its perimeter.

  The ocean is quiet but not silent. The boat itself is a friction against the water’s flat expanse, a dissent against nature. Its mere presence creates resistance. The wind on its lines. The flap of a flag. Sails luffing.

  The sun is going down. The woman reefs the mainsail and checks the tides. She surveys the cockpit to verify that a flashlight, binoculars, and a spare safety tether are close at hand. Her lips are working soundlessly, as though in recitation or prayer. Staring at the horizon, she waits for her vision to adjust to the failing light.

  ELLIOT

  AUGUST 2020

  Calamity began, as usual, on an ordinary day. The city roiled with the amplified impatience of a million insomniacs, sleeping children breathed polluted air, low-level exploitation crept across neighbourhoods with insectile persistence, and a thousand everyday kindnesses failed to rise to the surface of consciousness. People were being born and people were dying, and joy and grief were handed out with a logic as blind as the human heart. But as far as Elliot was concerned, the first sign of the coming disaster was just a call buzzing in over the radio at four a.m. on a Thursday morning: a Molotov cocktail lobbed through the window of a restaurant on the Lower East Side. The fire department had already put out the blaze, but some uniforms needed to pass by to make a report.

  Elliot and his partner Bryce dashed out of the convenience store, but by the time they reached their patrol car, Dispatch had assigned another unit a few streets closer.

  “Damn it.” Bryce fumbled with his seatbelt.

  “Let’s go anyways,” said Elliot. It was the crawling middle of a dead night-shift, and none of the usual hotspots on their beat were turning up trouble. “I just want something to happen.” He knew his partner shared his impatience for action on slow nights. Bryce steered them along Clinton Street to East Broadway and across to Seward Park, then, after a decent lap patrolling for the usual drug dealers, north on Orchard past all the tenement buildings and discount shops shuttered until morning.

  At the restaurant, the wide front window had been smashed, and a fluttering cordon now established an extravagant perimeter that extended halfway into the street. Bryce stepped under the tape and held it up for Elliot. “Pretty sure the wife wanted to come here for date night,” Bryce said. The tempered glass door was intact and lettered in goldenrod with the name cipolla. He pushed inside with a grin. “Guess that’s off.”

  “Why cancel?” said Elliot. “Looks like you could finally afford it.” Bryce punched him in the arm.

  Elliot thought the restaurant seemed familiar, but so many of these hip eateries looked the same that he couldn’t be sure. Though this one was finally unique now, with its soaked and blackened chaos inside, tipped chairs everywhere.

  The owner had already turned up, pulling at his hair and weeping openly. “I knew it. I knew if our name got out it would be the end of everything.” The man was shouting and coughing in the acrid air. “Why do they want to destroy us?” Witnessing his despair up close took some of the enjoyment out of their casual stop.

  “Shouldn’t have pissed off the wrong people,” said Bryce under his breath, toeing a bit of charred wallpaper. He nodded to their colleagues before ducking towards the exit.

  “What do you figure?” said Elliot, following him out. He paused on the curb, grateful for a deep breath of the cool night air.

  “Mafia, obviously,” said Bryce. His dad had been a cop, and his grandfather before him. He was full of New York City lore from the old days, when the streets were still a hard place and the police were merely foot soldiers in an unwinnable war. “Or insurance fraud, I guess.” He tossed Elliot the car keys. “Poor schmuck. He really was crying like a little girl, wasn
’t he?”

  “What, you never cry?” said Elliot. But he had to agree the tears had seemed genuine.

  The rest of their shift passed quietly, and at eight in the morning Elliot bid Bryce goodbye in the precinct garage after they parked the squad car. The first day off after working three weeks on nights was always a strange beast: half dream, half disappointment. It was important to switch gears, to massage your circadian rhythms, to keep your expectations low. Over the years, Elliot had developed a routine for the transition, but sometimes the drag of having to stick to a schedule was worse than how bad he knew he’d feel if he didn’t. Last fall his sister, Sarah, had sent him a study that said people who worked the night shift had years taken off their lives, suffered depression, and were more likely to develop cancer.

  “Get a desk job,” she told him at reliable intervals. “Something permanent, on day shift.”

  “Forget it,” he’d reply. “Desk is death.” Standing still was not something he enjoyed.

  Elliot drove to a diner for breakfast; then, wired from the previous night’s coffee breaks, decided to swing by the kung fu gym instead of going straight home to bed. He was feeling a tad reckless and impatient to get back to the world. He had three days off before a stretch of day shifts, when he would be able to work out again, get together with his buddies, even try to go on a date if any reasonable prospects materialized.

  Socialization was something new on Elliot’s radar, prompted less by a desire to go out than by an urgent need to remedy the hollowed-out feeling he’d been walking around with since his wife left him. Only after his divorce did he realize that Dory had been the one organizing and maintaining their entire social life. Finding himself friendless at thirty-five had felt not only lonely but careless. He’d met Dory while following up on a break-in at the publishing company where she worked, and she’d drawn him into her eclectic network of literati, DUMBO mixed-media artists, and PR specialists, who had welcomed him readily enough at the time but who had doubtless congratulated her on her shift to a more suitable partner. But thanks to his kung fu classes, Elliot had stumbled into a complete social circle, which gave him no less joy than he remembered from his very first friendships in grade school.

  He parked and climbed up to the second-floor studio, where he was surprised to find the door locked and a sign taped up that read CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. He peered inside, but all was dark. Odd that there was no explanation, nor any forewarning. In the four years he had been coming to the club, the gym had only been closed twice: once when the masters had gone to China, and another time when a water pipe had burst in the unit above. Elliot returned to his car and, leaning against the driver’s-side door, took out his phone and scrolled through his contacts, enjoying the slow sidling-up of a comfortable sleepiness as the sun warmed his face. He texted his friend Jejo, then Lucas, then Cameron, and everyone else he knew from the gym. He finally received a response from Jejo’s cousin, Mina, who was studying for her grey belt.

  Jejo’s dead. So are Cam and Lucas and the master. Teresa, Declan, Felix, and Paloma are in the hospital. It’s that bad flu that’s on the news. Sorry for telling you like this but I can’t talk now and it’s better that you know.

  Elliot drove home on autopilot, imagining himself as a robot, as though he could will away his too-susceptible flesh, and counted back through the days that had passed since he’d last seen them all. It had been during an evening shift at the end of July, just before this last block of nights. He’d heard something at the precinct about a bad virus going around, but he hadn’t paid much attention. How long it took to get sick, he had no idea. There was a layer of sweat between the steering wheel and his pale, clenched hands, which already felt like they belonged to somebody else.

  At home, Elliot turned on his computer and looked up the latest news on the outbreak. The virus was being described as potentially more infectious and deadly than swine flu. New York health authorities working with the CDC had begun reconstructing the movements of the first people to contract the illness and had released the name of a restaurant linked to their exposure: cipolla. The same restaurant that had been firebombed and the last place, he was sure now, where he had seen Jejo and the others. Torched, Elliot guessed, for fear of contagion, or by some relative of the dead in a futile railing against God. At the bottom of the news piece was a hotline number: If you suspect you have been exposed, please stay home and contact the Department of Health.

  His phone rang. It was his sister, but he silenced the call, unsure of how to articulate the staggering extent of his loss or the danger he himself now posed. His grief was choked out by an overwhelming sense of unreality, as though he were watching a montage of his own suffering: Elliot staring at a wall, Elliot burying his face in his hands, Elliot slapping himself for acting like a prisoner of cliché during one of life’s most serious moments—though, staring at his terrible, thin-lipped grin in the bathroom mirror, it occurred to him that the moment belonged rightfully to death. As the morning wore on, he tried to find information about the memorials planned for his gym buddies and discovered some of the funerals had already happened. The virus had struck the group with such efficiency that there had been no one left to call him. He stopped himself from texting Mina again, dreading more news even as he sought it out. The surface of his skin felt electric with mortality.

  Feeling dizzy, he moved from his desk to his bed, but lying down seemed like giving up. He got to his feet and paced the length of his apartment before settling back in the desk chair and rolling it over to the window that looked out onto the street. There was no sign of movement in the facing apartment buildings. He tried to reassure himself that most people were at work during the day.

  Quarantine Day One

  Elliot reported himself to the authorities later that morning in a series of phone calls that escalated through a chain of increasingly flustered functionaries. Eventually he was connected to someone at the Department of Health, to whom he managed to portray himself as something more than the average hypochondriac. The woman on the phone wasn’t up-to-date on the latest media coverage, and the restaurant name he kept repeating meant nothing to her, but she believed that he thought he had been exposed.

  “Okay, Elliot,” she said, after he told her his name and address. He could hear her typing in the background. “What you’re going to do is stay at home.”

  “How long?”

  “Twenty-one days,” she said. “Now, do you share a toilet with anyone? Are you married?”

  “I’m divorced.” Why did he still find it so hard just to answer no? “What’s this about toilets?”

  “You need to flush two or three times to reduce the risk of contamination for anyone else.”

  “I thought I wasn’t supposed to see anyone.”

  “You’re not. I’m just telling you.” The rhythmic clack of typing stopped for a moment. “Most importantly, take your temperature twice a day. If it spikes or if it reaches one hundred and four, call Emergency and explain that you’re on the quarantine list.”

  “Okay,” he said, already beginning to feel warm.

  “Someone will call you back tomorrow,” she said. “In the meantime, make a list of everyone you’ve seen, everywhere you’ve gone since the exposure.”

  “I was supposed to go out tomorrow.” Elliot swallowed against a mounting tightness in his throat. “See my sister and nephew.” If he died, what would happen to Sarah and Noah?

  “I know it’s hard, but try not to worry too much.” Her voice was saturated with resignation. She sounded like someone who was not used to delivering good news. “If you already have it, there’s nothing you can do.”

  Elliot asked then about the logistics of eating. “Is it better to order in or go grocery shopping? Or am I not allowed?” What was the exact calculation of risk relative to the need to eat?

  She quizzed him about the closest places to buy food and how crow
ded they tended to be. “Okay, try to make do for now. We’ll put you on the delivery list.”

  * * *

  —

  A few hours later the doorbell rang while he was taking a nap. He jumped out of bed, heart racing, confused and hopeful until he saw the text message on his phone: Your supplies are at the door.

  “Here,” said the health care worker. She was masked and gloved and held out two plastic bags at arm’s length.

  “Would you like to come in?” he asked as he took them from her. He watched as she recoiled and took a step backwards before adding, “Just a joke.”

  There was a muffled laugh. “Good one.” She was gone before Elliot could thank her. He noticed that she had pasted a quarantine notice on his door. He wondered how long it would be before his neighbours complained to the landlord.

  He called into work after lunch, and his supervisor’s brisk attitude was a comfort. “I’ll talk to Bryce, but let’s keep it quiet as long as you stay healthy. I’d rather not spread it around, so to speak.”

  “Just tell the guys I’ve got something sexier, like mono.”

  “Sexy, ha.” The sergeant barked a laugh. “No wonder you’re still single, Howe.”

  “Hey, it’s the kissing disease, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  —

  Elliot felt the strong urge to go for a drive, to speed as far away as possible from his present circumstances, but instead he spent the rest of the afternoon watching basketball, football, and even a world bowling championship while eating his way through two days’ worth of food, his tears flowing as freely as water from an open tap. When he stopped bothering to wipe his eyes, his cheeks dried with a salty film that made them feel papery and exposed.

  He heated up a can of baked beans and called Sarah to cancel, bracing himself for her disappointment.