"The air bites shrewdly," Hamlet said, shivering as he, Marcellus and I exited the same private plane the latter two among us had taken to the Bahamas. "It is very cold," he observed, though he only meant it in comparison to the warmth of his mother's touch.
"It is a nipping and eager air," I said.
"What hour now?"
"I think it lacks of twelve."
"No," Marcellus said as his Great Dane began to tug on his shirt in fear. "It is struck."
"Indeed, I heard it not," I quickly changed my tune, because if I were ever wrong the universe would surely implode. "It then draws near the season wherein the spirit held his wont to walk." Suddenly, before I could go on about things you already know, a ridiculously loud explosion, accompanied by a mushroom cloud and a blinding light that briefly turned this night to day, and uproarious cheering from the islanders, interrupted me. The three of us looked to the east to see what had been the cause for this admittedly rather low-key celebration—as a cop, I'd seen teens pull off worse. I put my sunglasses back on to defend my eyes from the blast. "What does this mean, my lord?" I asked, offended that I wasn't omniscient.
"The king doth wake tonight and takes his rouse," Hamlet answered, "keeps wassail, and the swagg'ring uprising; and, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down, the kettledrum and trumpet thus bray out the triumph of his pledge." Okay, just another drunk politician with his hands on the launch codes, nothing to see here.
"Is it a custom?" I asked, taking my glasses back off and, whilst looking at my reflection in them, wondering why my narration was seemingly not consistent with my dialogue.
"Ay, marry, is 't, but, to my mind, though I am native here and to the manner born, it is a custom more honored in the breach than the observance. This heavy-headed revel east and west makes us traduced and taxed of other nations." Well, yeah, your uncle just dropped a nuke on the Bahamas, dude. "They clepe us drunkards and with Bahamian phrase soil our addition. And indeed, it takes from our achievements, though performed at height, the pith and marrow of our attribute. So oft it chances in particular men that for some vicious mole of nature in them, as in their birth (wherein they are not guilty, since nature cannot choose his origin), by the o'ergrowth some complexion (oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason) or by some habit that too much o'erleavens the form of plausive manners—that these men, carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, being nature's livery or fortune's star, his virtues else, be they as pure as grace, as infinite as men may undergo, shall in the general censure take corruption from that particular fault. The dram of evil doth all the noble substance of a doubt to his own scandal."
I slapped Hamlet on the back of the head, partly because his speech had gone on way too long, but mostly because the ghost of his father had arrived, and we hadn't even left the airport yet. The people in the terminal around us marveled at the specter's amazing ability to get past security without having its naughty bits x-rated and e-mailed between perverted TSA employees.
"Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!" Hamlet gasped, falling to his knees before the ghost. "Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, be thy intents wicked or charitable, thou com'st in such a questionable shape that I will speak to thee." He cleared his throat, and I put my sunglasses back on. "I'll call thee 'Hamlet,' 'King,' 'Father,' 'Royal Dude.' O, answer me!" The ghost pretended to ignore Hamlet, because it was kind of a dick. "Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death, have burst their cerements; why the sepulcher, wherein we saw thee quietly interred, hath opened his ponderous and marble jaws to cast thee up again." Hamlet pretended to cry, because—no, wait, those tears were real, and if the laughter of everyone else in the airport was any indication, they were hilarious. Marcellus and I joined in the laughing, and so did Marcellus's dog, though the canine may have simply been high. "What may this mean that thou, dead corse, again in complete steel, revisits thus the glimpses of the moon, making night hideous, and we fools of nature so horridly to shake our disposition with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?"
"Like," Marcellus said, "that was deep, man."
"Say, why is this?" Hamlet begged of his undead father. "Wherefore? What should we do?"
The ghost beckoned Hamlet to go away with it as if some impartment did desire to him alone. Now imagine that sentence in quotation marks with a dialogue tag, because I totally said that, yo.
"Like, look with what courteous action it waves you to a more removed ground," Marcellus said, watching as the ghost tempted Hamlet to follow him with a trail of candy on the ground that much to the deceased king's frustration was being consumed by Scooby instead. "But do not go with it," Marcellus said, grabbing his dog's tail.
"No, by no means," I repeated, taking my sunglasses back off.
"It will not speak," Hamlet said, his gaze fixated on the plastic-wrapped sweets lying dirty on the floor like a bunch of tiny edible prostitutes. "Then I will follow it."
"Do not, my lord."
"Why, what should be the fear?" Hamlet said with a shrug. "I do not set my life at a pin's fee. And for my soul, what can it do to that, being a thing immortal as itself? It waves me forth again." Indeed the ghost did, this time actively throwing the candies at Hamlet's head. Catching a piece in his mouth and swallowing it whole, Hamlet said, "I'll follow it," with a smile.
"What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord?" I asked. "Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff that beetles o'er his base into the sea, and there assume some other horrible form which might deprive your sovereignty of reason and draw you into madness?" Of course, you probably know Hamlet is going to be drawn into madness anyway, because his girlfriend personifies madness and Hamlet sticks his man parts inside her. I put my sunglasses back on and continued, "Think of it. The very place puts toys of desperation, without more motive, into every brain that looks so many fathoms to the sea and hears it roar beneath."
"It waves me still," Hamlet said, reaching for the first of the bite-sized bombs of fat while his father's ghost nodded and smiled. "Go on, I'll follow thee."
"Like, you shall not go, my lord," Marcellus said, as he, his dog and I each grabbed Hamlet in an area of his body least likely to make us look like depraved homosexuals. Some of us failed at this, but to protect the innocent (Marcellus), I won't get any more specific than that.
"Hold off your hands," Hamlet said, slipping out of our grip gracefully.
"Be ruled," I said. "You shall not go."
"My fate cries out and makes each petty arture in this body as hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve. Still am I called. Unhand me, gentlemen, by heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me!" We let go, but as soon as we did, the ghost immediately grabbed Hamlet, but since he couldn't be made a ghost again, Hamlet could only whine at the unfairness of it all. "I say, away!" he repeated to us, before looking to his spiritual father and saying, "Go on, I'll follow thee." With exposition no longer holding them back, the two of them left, but not before Hamlet somehow became unlucky enough to be screened by the TSA on the way out of the airport. I couldn't wait to check my e-mail when I got home.
"He waxes desperate with imagination," I said, taking my sunglasses off.
"Let's follow," Marcellus said with a shrug. "Like, 'tis not fit thus to obey him."
"Have after," I nodded. "To what issue will this come?"
"Something is rotten in the state of Florida." Truer words were never spoken, and Marcellus was rightfully greeted with applause for his utterance of this phrase.
"Heaven will direct it."
"Nay, let's follow him."
For the final time in this chapter, I put my sunglasses back on, and then Marcellus and I hurried to my Hummer, blasted on the speed metal, and picked up some chicks at the club while we stealthily followed Hamlet and ghost Hamlet.