“Would you like to wager on how long you might last? Two—three days, perhaps? Oh, that’s right, you can’t wager, can you? You have nothing.”

“True,” said I. “Yet you see a victory in what is a simple truth for all of us, is it not? We have nothing, we are nothing.” The truth was, I had been nothing, felt nothing but longing and grief, since news of my sweet Cordelia’s death from fever had reached me three months ago. I did not fear death, nor even pain. I’d never have come to Brabantio’s palazzo if I had. That last moment, when I thought myself poisoned, I’d been relieved.

“Well, you are nothing. Would that you realized that before you brought ruin upon my daughter.”

“Portia? Oh, she’s not ruined. Bit sore, perhaps—might be walking a bit gingerly for a day or two from the rug burns, but she’s far from ruined. Think of her not as ruined, but simply as well used.”

Brabantio growled, then, red faced, he thrashed his head in the portal like a dirt-eating loony. (I thought he might burst a vein in his ancient forehead.) He seemed unable to form any retort but steam and spittle, which I took as cue to continue.

“Like a new pair of boots,” I said, Brabantio’s potion having made me especially chatty. “Like new boots you might wear into the water, so that even while enduring the squish and slop of them for a while, they cure to a perfect fit, molded, as it were, by experience, to receive you and only you. At which point you have to throw them over a chair and have raucously up the bum!”

“No!” barked the senator, at which point he flung a brick at me that would have taken a kneecap had I not quickly pulled myself up by the chains. The brick thudded off the wall and splashed somewhere in the dark.

“The strained-boot metaphor what sent you round the bend, then?” said I, a jolly jingle of my chains for levity. “You’re short a brick now, you know? You’ve bollixed up the whole bloody edifice over a smidge o’ literary license, thou thin-skinned old knob-gobbler.”

“Tis my eldest, Desdemona, that’s ruined,” said the senator, pressing his point by placing a brick atop the wall.

“Oh, well, yes, but I can’t take credit for that,” said I. And I was, of course, lying about his younger daughter. I’d never so much as been alone in a room with Portia. “No, Desdemona’s downfall is all Othello’s doing.”

Another brick joined its red brothers in line. Only the senator’s face was visible above them now.