Christmas Eve, 1776:

George Washington is having a hard time sleeping. He tosses and turns like a fish in the bed of a trawler. When he does drift off to sleep for just a couple of hours, he finds himself chaperoning his kid’s friend’s birthday party, which is being held at McDonald’s. The kids are unruly, throwing oversalted French fries and piping hot apple pies at each other and spreading their germs all over the Play Place. They are reveling in their bratty innocence when a man walks into the restaurant dripping flesh onto the floor like he’s shaking out his umbrella. But it is not raining outside. The man has large, geographic regions of deep partial- and full-thickness burns covering much of his torso like a world map. He goes unnoticed at first. Then people begin turning their attention toward him because he is swaying in place like kelp tethered to the ocean floor. They see that his shirt is mostly melted into his chest. It reminds the kids of when they went on a field trip to a historic cemetery and did rubbings of the embossed tombstones of local famous people. The man collapses to the ground and the children shriek. A small pool of concentrated urine the color of black tea forms beneath the man’s prone body. The urine creeps along the floor forming a channel between the tiles. It picks up a weightless fragment of discarded drinking straw wrapper, which boldly navigates the body of liquid like a swift vessel. Like the one George Washington will use to cross the Delaware River the following night.

Christmas Day, 1776:

The rest is history.