“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.