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.