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22 December 2023
THIS IS THE SECOND HALF OF \"PERSEUS THE SNIPER\". TO READ THE FIRST HALF, PICK UP ISSUE #5 OF OUR PRINT MAGAZINE AT YOUR LOCAL NEWSSTAND OR BOOKSTORE, OR CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY DIRECTLY FROM OUR SITE.
Pause.
\"Was your mom, like, a history major in college or something?\"
\"I don’t know. She died before we got around to discussing that, Miss Twenty Questions.\" That, too, was deadpan.
Longer pause.
\"Sorry.\" Then, \"Don’t call me that. I have a name.\"
\"And..?\"
\"It’s Portia.\"
\"Was your dad a car salesman or something?\"
She took a deep breath, and I could hear her counting the number of times she’d had to answer that same stupid question.
\"No. It’s spelled P-O-R-T-I-A. It’s Italian.\"
\"So why didn’t he name you Ferrari?\"
\"Probably for the same reason your mom didn’t decide to name you Ignorant Dickhead.\" I felt her shift her weight suddenly, preparing to jump down.
\"Oh, come on,\" I said soothingly, and stuck an arm out just below her voice. \"Stay. We’re just getting started.\" I put my arm down.
\"We?\" Her tone was icy, as if my use of the word \"we\" implied that \"we\" were a \"couple\". I could almost hear an eyebrow arch.
\"Yeah. Me, you, and the ghost of Bob Ross.\"
\"Jesus, what an asshole,\" she muttered. I felt her weight shift again under the weight of ice in her voice.
\"Wait! Seriously, I’m sorry!\" I stuck my arm out again.
\"No, you’re seriously an asshole.\"
\"Okay, I’m an asshole. Can I seriously feel your face before you go?\"
\"What?!?\"
\"Let me touch your face. It’s how I see.\"
\"I don’t think so.\"
\"Please? So I can at least see what you look like?\"
Hesitant pause, followed by a heavy sigh. \"Okay...\"
She turned to face me, and I reached carefully toward her with both hands, feeling the old familiar shock of touching a stranger as my fingers came in contact with such personal space. I found soft, straight hair pulled back in a neat ponytail. Thick hair, some of it tucked behind her ears. A wide forehead, thick eyebrows, expertly groomed. A delicate nose. No residue around the eyes or cheeks-- no makeup. She was an earthy type. Bee-sting lips. She opened her mouth slightly, and I fought the urge to pull my hand away.
Young girls have a weird thing for blind guys-- it comes from reading one too many romance novels. The average looking ones figure they have a better chance with a blind guy for reasons too obvious to get into here. Another thing I’ve learned about touching a girl\'s face is that sometimes they get it in their heads that I’m making a pass at them. I’m not. But let me tell you something, it’s a mighty goddamn unnerving sensation to suddenly find one of your primary senses of navigation and informational input in the warm, wet mouth of a complete stranger. Think about it. How about if I just walked up to you on the street and started licking your fucking retinas?
Once, I had a girl misunderstand the question completely, and start unbuttoning her blouse.
Portia allowed me touch her teeth, which were straight. Expensive, a lot of work done. I felt a wave of her warm breath roll over the backs of my fingers, and the sensation made me shiver slightly.
I brushed the backs of my fingers along her jaw line, and dragged them gently along her throat. I didn’t want her to think I was trying to choke her. Besides, I was conscious of the fact that, blind or not, I was a healthy, red-blooded American male, and Portia was a healthy, red-blooded American girl, which meant, more than likely, that we were probably being watched by a suspicious, red-blooded American adult. I dragged twin trails of fingernail gently down the back of her neck toward her shoulders, detecting the faintest sensation of heat from her skin beneath a cotton t-shirt. Now it was her turn to shiver. She giggled and shrugged away, breaking the connection.
I decided Portia was very pretty, and I told her so. And then I answered her question.
\"I want to be a sniper.\" I was smiling when I said that. I’m sure of it.
\"Huh?\"
\"You asked me what I wanted to do with my life, and I just told you.\"
\"That’s so gay!\" I felt her laugh rush toward me like silvery ripples in a pond. \"Why do you want to kill people?\" she exclaimed. \"Have you even seen a gun before?\"
\"No. I’m blind, remember? And I never said I wanted to kill anyone. I just like the idea of being able to reach out over a long distance and have a profound effect on a person’s life. \'Sniper\' is just a shorthand word that defines what I want to do.\"
\"You could be a telemarketer. They’re profound.\"
\"Look, you asked me and I told you.\"
\"Bullshit. That’s such a fucked-up answer!\"
\"Well, it’s my fucked-up answer.\"
A red-blooded American older woman’s voice was calling her name, with just a hint of alarm and consternation. She must have seen me cop a feel of Portia’s face.
\"I have to go.\" I felt her boost herself off the platform at last with one solid thrust. The thud of feet a second later told me she’d landed squarely on the deck below. \"You’re a weird guy, Perseus,\" she called up to me as the rain began to pour, an explosion of water droplets impacting against the dry wood of the half-pipe. \"Take care of yourself!\"
I scrambled to my feet recklessly. \"You’re a lovely girl with a firm grip, Portia!\" I shouted back at her, my hands cupped to my mouth in order to be heard. The storm was finally here. \"I hope to see you again someday!\" I stood there for sometime, hoping she’d say something back, or maybe give me her phone number. But she was swallowed in the howling wind. Finally, I succumbed to the embarrassment of allowing a relative to lead me back inside. I could have found my own way just fine, even on my trembling legs.
On my eighteenth birthday I walked into the office of a local Marine recruiter with my cane and dark glasses and told him I wanted to be a sniper. I could still hear his laughter as I walked out of his office and headed down the street. I’m sure it made his day.
Now, ten years later, I’m stretched out on a very large bed smoking a cigarette in a five-star, non-smoking hotel room (I always tell the staff I didn’t see the \"No Smoking\" sign, but I tip big and clean up my own mess. I’m nothing if not respectful.), remembering the day I touched her face in the rain.
These days, I’m a self-employed data harvester. My clients tell me what kind of information is in season, and for a reasonable fee, I get it for them. It’s sort of like being a sniper, except that my rifle of choice is a very fancy directional antenna. Due to some serious flaws discovered in Bluetooth technology, primarily used in mobile phones, I can remotely download contact information from address books, \"read\" calendar appointments, listen to private messages, plant phony text messages of my own, or turn a phone on while it’s sitting in a pocket or on a restaurant table top or the backseat of a Park Avenue limo, and pick up nearby conversations without leaving a trace.
Oh, sure, the poor bastard in question might figure out that his phone made a call it shouldn’t have made, but he won’t necessarily come to the right conclusion, that someone like me recorded the conversation and sold his ass up the river. He’ll just think he accidentally pressed some buttons while the phone was in his back pocket. Wouldn’t you?
Aimed at the right window, I can do a lot worse than kill you: a high-powered young executive had been knock-knock-knocking on his boss\' wife\'s back door. At the husband\'s direction, I routed a specific file from my computer to the exec’s phone and then on to another phone-- the receiver thought the message originated from the victim, even though there was no record of the sent message on the victim’s phone. So when the FBI grabbed the phone for evidence in a major insider trading investigation, the message was right there in his outbox. Last I heard, the exec had a large, sweaty man named \"Scroat\" for a cellmate.
On my last job, I aimed the business end of my rifle at the eleventh story window of a convention center chock-full of oil men, and digitally collected over 300 phone books in under an hour.
After that, I spent a month straight on a quiet beach in Hawaii. Peace and quiet.
Last year, I broke my own personal long-distance record, attacking the personal Motorola of a certain Highly Recognizable Political Figure, who, at the time, was almost a mile away giving a speech at an outdoor auditorium. I downloaded his entire phone book and every text and voice message he had stored in it, while he addressed an audience of thousands dressed in a freshly pressed suit and tie. I later learned the files I stole included a naughty little MPEG of himself and a woman who was probably not Mrs. Highly Recognizable Political Figure, unless his wife has moves like Michelle Yeoh and charges him a thousand dollars an hour to force-feed him chocolate cake, beat him senseless with a horsewhip, and call him the kinds of names I haven’t heard since middle school. That information went directly to my employer, who in turn presented it to the H.R.P.F., who in turn quietly tended his resignation rather than face being ripped to shreds by the media, his wife, or the acting Editor-in-Chief of a certain right-wing magazine that flaunts \"family values\" like hundred dollar bills in a whorehouse.
That one put me into a much higher tax bracket.
The money’s good, obviously, but aside from job-enhancing toys and equipment, like BITS and CESAR, projects that deal with translating graphical user interface into synthetic speech or Braille, I don’t have a whole lot to spend the rewards on. Trips, mostly. Places where I can get some peace and quiet.
Lucky for me, no one is safe from stupidity. That’s the thing about cell phones: everyone knows they aren’t safe, but still, people cram them full of sensitive information and compromising images, completely astonished when consequence takes a bite out of their lily-white asses. As long as people are stupid, I’ll have a job. And according to IMS Research, two million Bluetooth-enabled devices-- phones, laptops, and PDAs-- are shipped weekly in this great big world, and there’s talk of putting Bluetooth in everything: home security systems, medical devices....
As soon as I finish this cigarette I’m going to pack my bags, put away my equipment, and break down my rifle, carefully, lovingly disassembling it and storing the parts in the custom-made case I had built for it. As always, the last thing I do is run my fingers across the metal nameplate on the case, exploring the letters engraved there.
I know them by heart.
P-O-R-T-I-A.
artid
3177
Old Image
7_11_sniper.jpg
issue
vol 7 - issue 11 (jul 2005)
section
pen_think