A pickup truck passed and Ed waved to its sole occupant who dutifully waved back within the sunlit dome of his vehicle. Since the Actor had left the colony, there were no incidents with homicidal trucks （cause and effect?）， but Ed now took it upon himself to wave to every car rumbling down Senderovsky’s road. He had even acquired something of a reputation among the locals as the Waver of V—— Road. To not wave back at him had become a local faux pas, no matter the color of the flag swinging off one’s porch. Dee thought she understood some of the reasoning for his fake cheer. Senderovsky once accounted for his own self-abusive Russian Jewish humor as a demographic imperative, the need to make fun of himself before the dominant group （Christian Slavs） could get a chance to do so, to self-slap before being punched down. There was something of that in Ed’s happy wave, too, along with an overblown “model minority” smile that disappeared with the sound of the car’s passing swoosh or became genuine when he turned and looked into Dee’s face. This made her happy. There was a lot going on with Ed, but only she got to see the whole of it. The daily Ed walks gave her purpose and pleasure. They saved her from her fruitless encounters with social media, which meant they also saved her from herself.
* * *
—
There was a restaurant known for its hand sanitizer in a charming and progressive nearby town, once the center of the nineteenth-century riverside whale-processing industry. The restaurant was Southeast Asian in nature, a cuisine Ed claimed he could not successfully replicate for lack of the right ingredients, and it proffered food and collected payment without any human contact at all, except for a sterilized nod at the counter once the credit card information had clicked into place. After picking up their tray, the diner adjourned to a table within a vast tented former parking lot where each table was separated from the next by at least three meters.
Ed and Dee drove down to the whale-processing town in a fit of excitement. They were sick of rural anthropology and desperate for new spice. It was almost dinnertime at the colony, and on this day the colonists would be deprived of their chef. （The fact that both he and Dee would be absent raised one of Senderovsky’s considerable eyebrows as well as his wife’s smaller woolly caterpillar.）
Ed marveled at the privileged, Senderovsky-like way Dee drove past the dappled fields in her unexceptional car, as if death was not an option for her even when the lane markers were clearly being violated and all of the cockpit instrumentation beeped and buzzed in protest. “I hope you won’t flog me!” Dee joked after she had run a tractor off the road with her impudence. “I know how particular you Kims are about your chauffeurs.”
He laughed behind his aviator sunglasses and wondered if they were on a date. In his beloved （and now debunked） Japanese reality show, a nerd had asked a beauty on a date and she had suggested they go to Costco with the rest of their roommates as a way of turning him down. It had become known as the Costco Incident. He did not think of himself as a nerd, yet had studiously avoided that type of incident his entire life and had many empty Moleskine diaries to show for it.
They waited for their food along a pathway lined with cute signs about mask wearing and distancing, which we don’t need to reproduce here, then collected their trays and sat down at a table in the middle of the restaurant’s buzzing big tent, where they were soon molested by a wasp. “He’s harmless,” Dee educated her date as he tried and failed to shoo away the large clumsy insect with his fluttering hands. “He’s a cicada killer. They don’t sting.”
“Huh,” Ed said. He rolled up the deadstock cotton sleeves of his banker-striped shirt and refastened its thick mother-of-pearl buttons around the biceps of his tanned arms. “You shouldn’t dress up so much,” Dee said, observing his ritual. “Just wear plainer things. You have such a nice body. Give us a peek.”
He did not know how to respond. “Oh,” he said inwardly while presenting her with a blush. He opened the cardboard containers of sweet potato curry, black pepper wings in Vietnamese fish sauce, and a “Romanesco” larb studded with little gem lettuces and pickled chilies, and began to distribute the food. She poured two cups from a refreshing bucket of mezcal and grapefruit liqueur. As they toasted silently, they looked deep into each other’s eyes for a long, bashful beat. He drank down to the bottom and wiped his mouth with his naked hand. He didn’t care anymore. If it didn’t work out and he had to go to Chania alone, he would simply lock himself in a hotel room and drain the life from his body in one way or another.