This popped into my head, and I had to write it down.
Bond took the trick, winning the last hand of Chemin0de-fer, and he was heartily sick of it. If he’d had actual cards in his hand, he’d have thrown them at the table, along with the shoe. But he was playing video chemmy on-line, which was the best he could do while in quarantine lockdown along with the rest of London, so he simply shouted a brief obscenity at the laptop and closed it with an angry snap.
It was Bond’s eighth week of isolation and he was beginning to feel himself going insane. May, his elderly gift of a Scottish housekeeper, was closeted away in her own apartment elsewhere in Chelsea, not supposed to be out because her advanced age made her more vulnerable. He couldn’t blame her for that, but with her absent he’d been forced to see to his own cleaning. Worse, he had to do his own cooking, and he was getting tired of scrambled eggs, the only meal he was competent to prepare. He’d already run through all the variations he knew. There was something abysmal about the thought of takeaway. The good restaurants nearby had closed rather than resort to that extreme.
He’d been forced to live off what he had in his fridge and cupboard. Too many ham sandwiches heavily slathered with mustard, and washed down with the dwindling supply from his liquor cabinet. It wasn’t a good regimen for staying in shape. After the first few weeks he’d stopped doing the toe touches and the arm and chest exercises – he didn’t like getting dizzy in his apartment if he couldn’t go out. A couple of weeks later the straight-leg lifts had gone, too. Now he wasn’t even doing his press-ups. What was the point?
He was still considered “essential personnel”, but during a coronavirus pandemic there weren’t many calls for political assassinations, and even the megalomaniac would-be world dominators had gone into hibernation. There’s no fun in taking over the world if there’s nobody out and about to see you do it. So Bond sat at his company-supplied laptop and read reports, trying to keep current and away from the on-line gambling sites. But it was a losing battle.
For a time he’d tried to work on his perennial project, his self-defense book Stay Alive!, but his heart wasn’t in it. He came to realize that he really needed drawings or photographs to illustrate his point, but he was no artist or photographer. Stay Alive! Was now gathering electronic dust in his computer document files.
He couldn’t even take refuge in sex, his next-favorite pastime. Ever since Tiffany Case took up with Pussy Galore he’d been alone, and the bars and pubs were all closed. The borders were all shut, so he couldn’t jet off to ski in the Alps or snorkel in Jamaica.
What to do? He refused to even consider watching movies off the streaming service, especially those absurd “action” films. He was tired of exchanging messages with Felix, who was as fast with one hand as most people were with two. Maybe he could text that Swiss lawyer Gumbolt and see if he knew where Ernst was hiding away. God knows he’d appreciate how he was feeling.
007: Do you expect me to talk?
CoVID-19: No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to be bored to death!
I’ve had three Zoo conferences in the past week.
Commentary on this – (Wait until the very end to get the relevance)
I enjoyed your story Cal. If I were more motivated, I’d compose a few paragraphs describing how some other famous fictional character (or real-life celebrity) is dealing with quarantine. And perhaps the thread could evolve into a new “If LotR Had Been Written By Someone Else!?”
But right now I have to watch this Columbo episode.
Somewhere in the Antarctic – Day 37 – I don’t care if MacReady is one of those Things or not, if he keeps playing chess on that broken computer that makes those freaky noises, I’m going to shoot him and burn the corpse.
If Bond is doing this bad in quarantine, imagine how it is going for Sterling Archer.
Stranger