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The Summer Before the Plague An egotist aware of his egotism may decide his awareness exonerates him. May see his egotism as a wolf, curled at his feet, hungry for bites from the table, and wonder what familiars possess his fellow guests. For they are all patent egotists, more so than he because none has the wit, knowledge and charm he can’t express here, in the gloom cast by the others, who feel, no doubt, the same way. A spider. A snake. Then he wonders, What if I tried to conquer egotism, care genuinely, listen naively to the others, however boring boring boring boring they are. What victory would that achieve? Over self? But what if there are only selves; would the other selves notice? … He waits. They say predictable things. A power failure has brought dinner onto the porch, and a pretense that the heat is bearable. It is, just, with the last of the wine, citronella candles and sunset. Lizards, migrating north with the tropics, scuttle. The host’s disturbed wife disconsolately roams the candlelit kitchen. This will end, thinks the egotist heavily. The future I yearn for, despair of, dread and am will itself become trivial, forgotten. Bores are corpses in waiting. Why not, therefore, as in the later stages of dementia, abandon any claim to (self-)expression? Someone coughs; somewhere amid the cooling food and sickly air, the unsuspected vector.