Mark Budman is a first-generation immigrant, currently living in Boston, USA. His writing has appeared in McSWeeney’S, Catapult, Witness, Five Points, Guernica/PEN, American Scholar, Huffington Post, Mississippi Review, Virginia Quarterly, and elsewhere. His novel “My Life at First Try” was published by Counterpoint Press. www.markbudman.com
At our end of the known universe, the receptionist wears a surgical mask, but the Lady can see she’s young. They all are. The generation bred during the pandemics. She should have pity on them, but the receptionist is a healthcare provider, and she hates them all. If not for them, germs and viruses wouldn’t exist. They get everyone confused about which is the chicken and which is the egg here.
But today she needs them. For two reasons.
“You have both Medicare and Medicaid, Ms. Macbeth,” the receptionist says. It’s not clear if that is a statement or question. Typical for her profession. Trying to keep you off balance.
The Lady nods, clutching her purse.
“Correct. Medicare and Medicaid,” she says. “But it’s not Ms. Macbeth. It’s Lady Macbeth.”
“No problem, Ms. Macbeth. I see that you complain of dry skin and bleeding on your hands?”
The Lady is wearing a cloth mask with a sign: “If you don’t see the bottom, don’t wade.”
She takes off her mittens and then the surgical gloves. Under that, her hands are bleeding. Not as bad as the hand of her neighbor Pontius, but bad enough.
The receptionist types something. “No problem. Dr. Duncan will see you now.”
The doctor is the same age as the receptionist, which is not much above zero. “What can I do for you, Ms. Macbeth?”
She sighs, but doesn’t correct him. It’s useless.
“My hands bleed.”
How many times does she have to repeat that? She’s trying to mask her anger.
The doctor observes her hands without touching. He maintains the required social distancing. The handshake is out of the question. But not touching her hands is unprofessional. Who does he think he is? A doctor or a king? “Do you wash them often?” he asks.
What a stupid question, she thinks. “Is Shakespeare a playwright?” she says. The doctor’s eyes squint. Did he understand the joke? It doesn’t matter now. He wouldn’t tell anyone even if he did.
“A lot of people wash hands excessively in the times of COVID,” he says. “I’ll prescribe you a cream. What is your pharmacy?”
“The Bard’s Own. 13 Magic Mountain Ave.” He types something. “Okay, prescription sent. Anything else?” “I want the COVID shot.” “We don’t administer them here, ma’am. I’m sorry. You have to schedule it online.” She wants to say that she doesn’t have a computer. She has accepted modern society, but computers are her line in the sand.
She leaves without a goodbye. This doctor is worse than useless. If she were still married, she’d make her husband kill him. By the time she boarded the bus, she came up with three different ways of convincing Lord Macbeth, if he still had his head on his shoulders. But she has no time for that. The Wake is tonight. She must be ready.
On the other end of the known universe, Hamlet is sitting in the throne room of his two-bedroom rent-controlled castle, on the second floor of an apartment building. He’s been in New Amsterdam, er, New York since he left his native Denmark and arrived here via Cuba.
When he just moved into this building, his neighbor stopped him and said, “Welcome to the Weirdos Abode, my dear. My name’s Fagin.” He smelled of gin, mothballs, and cheap cologne. They shook hands since it was in the pre-COVID times.
Fagin asked, “What is the origin of his name, my dear?” “’Hamlet’ means a ‘small settlement,’” Hamlet said. “But who is this little fellow behind me? It looks like he’s trying to steal my wallet.”
“That’s Artful Dodge. He didn’t mean it. He’s just practicing…. If he has something to pawn, dear, here’s my card.” Hamlet pawned his bodkin a year later, so he could never say this again: “When he himself might his quietus make/With a bare bodkin?” Which meant, if delivered in prose, that even if he wanted to commit suicide after losing his bodkin, he couldn’t. Unless he drowned himself like Ophelia did. But he would never have flown so gracefully on the surface of the water as she did in the pre-Raphaelite painting of Sir John Everett Millais.
Fagin plays a fiddle on the building’s roof sometimes while an old lady named Siren from 12B sings. She wears a long gown she calls “chiton.” She says she used to be a good singer in her youth. No one listens to them except for Anna Karenina from 43C and Hiawatha from 51B. Neither claps.
Anna mutters Russian curses under her breath while playing with her favorite Faberge egg. She’s bitter because she keeps missing every train in the city.
Hiawatha sits with an aquarium on his lap and smokes his Peace-Pipe. The aquarium contains Mishe-Nahma, with a crown on its head, his pet King of Fishes. Mishe-Nahma is lucky. COVID doesn’t transfer in water.
Once, a homeless man tried to break into the building shouting he wanted to hear Siren closer. He shouted his name was Odysseus. Hamlet thought he mispronounced his own name. How odd. How sad.
Hamlet just lost his job because of COVID. He used to play Laertes in a Shakespearean festival. The director, a certain Ebenezer Scrooge, refused to give him any more prominent roles because he said Hamlet had such a weird accent. Scrooge paid him little. Now, Hamlet is taking an online course: “How to Steal his Enemy’s Chi for Profit and Pleasure.” Hamlet wants to use his new skills on Ebenezer. It would be fun to come to him on Christmas Eve, as a ghost, and say, “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt/Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!” And, in due course, Ebenezer would resolve.
But the Wake is tonight. They all must be ready.
Smack in the middle of the known universe, Peter Pan stands before his mirror.
“People used to tip their hats in greeting,” he says to his reflection. “Now, they raise their masks up their noses. Is it progress?”
Nowadays, he can talk face-to-face without a mask only with his reflection. The reflection smiles back to his smile.
Peter puts his mask on, pocket his nitrile gloves, and goes for a stroll.
The street is narrow with no sidewalks. This part of the North-Eastern metropolis is semi-rural. He sees wild turkeys and rabbits and chipmunks and ducks. Once he saw a dead turtle. It looked artificial, like a middle school project. A few times bad urban actors landed here brought by the ocean breeze.
Walking is the only joy Peter has now. That and talking to his reflection.
A man—they call his type dudes—ambulates toward him. He’s mask-less. A cigarette dangles from his lips. He carries a bottle with something brown. Either whiskey or a dehydrated man’s piss.
Peter pulls up his mask. It was made at a sock factory, so it’s kind of a genetically altered sock. White, with black polka-dots.
“Good morning, sir,” the dude says, grinning.
It’s evening. At least in this city. Peter smiles. The dude can’t see his smile. Maybe this is why he blocks Peter’s way.
“Excellent weather, sir,” he says.
“You are right,” Peter replies.
“Bingo,” the dude says. “Let me shake his hand. And I like your accent. British?”
Peter can’t allow handshaking, though he loved it in the better times. Fortunately, a police cruiser is riding by. A single cop gets out. Maybe his partner is in jail, or downtown gazing at the demonstrators?
“What’s going on?” he says. He is bigger than the dude and Peter combined. “Nothing,” the dude says. “Nothing, officer, sir.” “Can I have your ID,” the cop asks him.
Peter wants to say that the right word is may and not can, but the dude turns away, drops his bottle and runs. The cop is in hot pursuit.
Yet the Wake is tonight. Readiness is a virtue.
At our end of the known universe, Lady Macbeth locks herself up in the bathroom before leaving the building, and washes her hands. She imagines the water running blood-red. She gets almost delirious at the thought of how many millions of coronaviruses she just killed. Die, die, die, she whispers. She’ll kill them all.
In the evening, she’ll go to visit Pontius. He’s lucky—he’s got his shot. He has a monstrous size computer. It takes up the whole room. He calls it UNIVAC. It probably means something in Latin.
He’ll tell his usual stories. He keeps doing that for years. He keeps embellishing them every time.
He was a son of a consul. His uncle killed his father and married his mother. A spy ruined his drapes. Pontius killed them all. When coming back from a war in Asia, Pontius got lost. He returned home twenty years later. A bunch of suitors besieged his wife. He killed them all by drowning them in barrels of Malmsey wine.
In another war, Pontius defended a mountain passage with 300 Judean soldiers against a million Persians, one thousand wild beasts and ten Emad (Shahab-3 variant) missiles. Pontius killed them all.
Recently, he went to the Roman hospital, craving to hear his native Latin, and all they had there were IVs.
After the story, the Lady and Pontius will take turns washing their hands in the kitchen sink. The water in the sink turns red like the waters of the Nile during the first plague. Eventually, it’ll run clear.
They shouldn’t forget about the Wake tonight.
In the middle of the known universe, Hamlet’s lecturer’s name is Medusa. Funny, but she appears without her head on her bio’s pic. She’s such a snake. Gave Hamlet an F because he failed to still the chi from a dead dandelion she pointed to via Zoom. Every other student apparently did. How else would the dandelion be dead?
Hamlet comes to the window of his castle. Thumbelina sits on the window sill. She’s eating a piece of a Danish. “Hvordan går det?” He asks her in their native language. She’s his former compatriot after all.
In 12A, Othello and Desdemona have their usual loud marital bliss scene. Unless it’s a marital dispute. Haroun Al-Rashid and Scheherazade from 51A go out into the night. It looks like they’ve been doing it at least a thousand times. During the day, they grind their lower dantians against each other loudly. Unlike most people, their dantians are only one inch below their navels.
Thumbelina and Hamlet do some chi-gathering exercise together while listening to Fagin berating someone called Oliver, “shut up and drink his gin.”
“I feel old and spent,” Hamlet says in English. “In my younger days, I’d take this Fagin to a duel.”
“Don’t worry,” Thumbelina says also in English. “It’ll be a while before they say, ‘Let four captains / Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage’.” Then she cries on his shoulder. They watch the nightfall together. It’s Hamlet’s 153,000th nightfall, but only the 67,000th for Thumbelina.
She’s so young, tiny and defenseless, Hamlet thinks. She reminds him of Ophelia. He’ll steal some chi for her when he graduates his course, his curse, damn it for the next 400 years. All he needs for happiness in life is some chi and, maybe, a bit of luck.
And he mustn’t forget about the Wake tonight.
Smack in the middle of the known universe, Peter Pan puts on his gloves, gets inside the cruiser and takes off for a joyride. He’s thankful to the sock factory and Amazon. They help to fool all the security cameras. Of course, Amazon also sells them. A win-win situation. Peter likes winners.
The car’s wheel is the plane’s yoke now. Peter pulls it back, and the cruiser rises to the yet virus-fee and cop-free sky.
That’s his classical escape route.
But he’ll be back to the Wake tonight.
Later, when the sun is down, they all assemble on the roof of the rent-controlled castle. Most wear black, except for Siren. She says white sings to her heart.
Hamlet is presiding. If not for his red scarf, he could have been mistaken for a gravedigger. He holds a skull in his hands. The skull is dusty. Poor Yorick.
“Tonight, we honor our dear departed friend, the Handshake,” Hamlet says.
“And we should mourn the death of the hand kissing, too,” Anna interrupts. A few women murmur their approval.
Hamlet nods, but goes on. “Like many classical figures before it, the Handshake fell victim to the Plague. When it was alive, and people’s fingers met, so did our hearts and souls. Where the six feet of the social distance came from? I’ll tell you. It’s the depth of the grave. Now, when we social distance, we are separated by more than that. Without you, our dear departed, it’s worse than the silence of the grave. In the grave, we could shake hands with Eternity. Now, we are alone. The most we are allowed to do is the fist bump.”
He lowers his head. A tear snakes down his princely cheek. Everyone lowers their heads but not before bumping their fists. Most wear rubber gloves. Most have tears in their eyes.
The Wake is over. A sigh is heard, as if someone closes the last classical book in the world.