“Good evening, the country is opening again!” it sounded triumphant in my cell phone. I immediately recognized the voice: not that of Minister Ernst Kuipers, but of Het Virus itself, which the minister imitated rather clumsily.
“Very funny,” I said sullenly, because I was not in the mood for bad jokes.
“Aren’t you happy then?” he asked.
“How so?”
“Everything will be allowed again soon!” he crowed. “Away one and a half meters, away from a mouth cap, except in public transport, you can receive everyone at home again, you can go to the cafe, the nightclub, the museum, the cinema or the theater, in short, it will be swinging again in Amsterdam. Are you in?”
“In the cinema, an infected person can sit next to me and pass me his Omikron.”
“Ah, Omikron,” he said, “it’s not going so fast anymore, I’ve managed to get it down pretty well.”
I remembered that last time he had told me that Omikron was an unwanted split from him, that had become too brash – a sort of JA21 that got rid of Thierry Baudet.
“You won’t be so bothered by Omikron anymore,” he said now. “That club will implode on its own. It was actually a little virus. I am looking for a spicier variant, one that dares to cross borders.”
“You shouldn’t use that word lightly,” I said.
“Why not? Crossing boundaries is my passion and my life. That you have so much trouble with that is your business. Do you never cross boundaries?”
“It’s none of your business.” I noticed that I was starting to react more and more grumpily to him. I had had enough of him, too often I had had to listen to his vain, self-righteous talk. There is nothing more annoying than someone who is constantly showing off their own feathers. We are all vain, but you can at least try to curb that vanity somewhat. He reminded me of a football coach who praises his tactics when he wins and when he loses he claims that the players have not executed that tactic properly.
“Not so grim,” he said. “For the first time in two years you can be a little happy again, but you react like a vinegar piss.”
“Because with my age I don’t know where I stand. Society is reopening, but I’ll just have to figure it out. I was asked to have dinner with about fifteen people in a rather small space. To do or not to do? If I do something like that, I might set my wife on fire. ‘Did you have a nice evening?’ she will ask, and meanwhile I will cough her to death.”
He tried to laugh in a muffled way, but I could hear it clearly. “If I understand correctly, you are even more afraid of me than before,” he said.
I nodded—something he should be able to see with his third eye. “You used to openly seek confrontation,” I said. “You made no secret of your desire to exterminate us all as quickly as possible. But you have become a sniper who now mainly targets the elderly and the sick who cannot defend themselves. So a coward, someone who…”
He disconnected, I had exceeded his limits. Would he take revenge or would he leave me alone? We will see.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 23, 2022