1.285906053177918e-5

 1.285906053177918e-5. 

“This I can tell you,” Uncle Albert was saying at lunch today. I had made tuna-salad sandwiches on toast and heated up a can of tomato soup. We were drinking lactose-free milk. Roz wasn’t eating with us. Roz doesn’t eat with us, not lunch. But that’s another story for another time.

     “This I can tell you,” he said a second time after a spoonful of soup: “I am not going to write you after I die.” He stopped, took a bite of his sandwich, said, “Not bad,” took a spoonful of soup, swallowed, and pointed his spoon at me: “So, if you get anything from me,” he said, “you’ll know it’s a forgery.”

     I nodded.

     “Yes?” he said.

     “Yes,” I said.

     “So, I’m on record.”

     “Yes,” I said again.

The phone rang. It was Nils.

     “What are you guys doing?” Nils’ voice on the phone said.

     “Eating lunch.”

     “Right. Sorry.” Pause. “What are you eating?”

     “Tuna-salad sandwiches and soup,” I said. “Tomato.”

     “Let me talk to Albert.” I waited. “Okay?”

     “He wants to talk to you.” I handed the phone to Uncle Albert.

     Buzz, buzz, buzz. Albert says “Okay.” A couple of times. He hands the phone back to me and goes back to his soup and sandwich.

     “Ask him if he talked to me,” Nils said.

     “He can hear you,” I said. “He says he did.”

“How’s he doing?” Nils asked.

     “Fine, I think.” Uncle Albert nods. “He’s nodding,” I said.

     “Good. I worry about him, but . . . .” Nils stopped. He started again: “Though get this!” He had stopped, I realized, to climb up on his soap box. I interrupted.

     “Wait. Do you want me to put you on speaker?
     There was a pause. “No.” Another pause. “So,” Nils said.

     “So we’re approaching 100,000 deaths from COVID-19 I hear this morning. It sounds like a lot until you begin calculating. Right?” He goes right on. “It’s between twelve-and-a-half and thirteen ten-thousandths of one percent of the world’s people.

     “Of course, everyone that has the virus, some 1.6 million - one-fiftieth of one percent (Is that right? Never mind.) - will infect 2.4 other people, who will infect 2.4 others until, if Zeno’s paradox doesn’t intervene, we’ll all be either dead or (relatively) immune.

     “All this is God’s fault since he sends these things either to chastise us or because he’s too lazy to prevent them, in which case he’s not the one that’s been finding you your damn parking place. But we know he is. So almost certainly to chastise, right?”

     It was a rhetorical question - no time to answer before he plunged on. “Still, it’s better to be living now that in Noah’s time when comorbidity factors weren’t small matters like difficulty in breathing but one large one, the inability to breathe underwater.” He stopped. I waited.

     “Sorry,” he said.

“What did he want?” Uncle Albert asked. “Your soup’s cold.”

     “I know,” I said. “He said he was sorry.”

04.10.20