“Howdy, Gupta,” I say as I trot past the mist of his hose. At the door, I ring the bell, and I’m kind of jogging in place. I ring it again. At my feet, there’s a flower bowl of puffy-faced dahlias and aster, all purple and trippy. Normally I’d get sort of queasy, and my ribs would be tightening. But I feel great, like I’m ten years younger.
It takes long enough, but Seema finally answers. She’s sort of smiling at first.
“Look, Seema, wow,” I say. “I am so into peace. And animals.”
“Blackbird? What are you doing here?”
“I’m a Cancer, you know,” I tell her. “So it’s hard for me to talk. And I have all these weird dreams, not the ones with the Sony Girls — ha-ha — but mostly where I mow the lawn. Sometimes I just wash the car, like Gupta! But there’s this voice in my head, and Lt. Kim thinks that once we get it to go away, I’ll stop worrying that the good things in life are destined to fail, like you and me. But I’m up in this satellite dish, and I’m thinking: what if this is the voice that still believes things can be okay, that believes in good and warns me away from bad? It wants to protect me, just like the United Nations.”
“Dad,” Seema says.
“You win a lot of awards, you know,” I say. “And you think you’re Aladdin, cruisin’ on that carpet, showin’ off with some loop-the-loops, but the real question is — what about the evil genie? Honestly, Seema, I’m no Aladdin. I’m more like the little monkey.”
Gupta comes up the driveway, wielding a soapy brush.
I admit I’ve been gesturing kind of wild with my rifle. I pull the last Buzz from my back pocket, all hot and shaken. It goes everywhere when I open it, and I lift a finger to say gimme a sec while I suck the overflow.
“Pardon moi,” I say with foam on my face.
“I think it’s time to leave, Tim,” Gupta says.
“Okay, that was a lie, I admit it. I don’t really speak French.”
“Dad, let me handle this,” Seema says. “Get lost, stalker-boy,” she shouts and goes to slam the door.
“Hey, wait,” I tell her. “I really have to use your bathroom.”
I still need to explain how I don’t like to shoot women, but Seema assumes a jiu-jitsu stance, so I decide I’ll maybe just down my Buzz and go.
* * *
The next morning, I wake on the lawn of the police station with a blistering case of dry mouth. The sprinklers have run, and I’m clueless how I got here. My rifle’s gone. When I sit up, it’s like there’s rock salt in my joints, and maybe I cracked a couple floater ribs — sure signs I’ve been on the losing end of some grappling. Wringing the water out of my shirt, flashes start coming to me from last night — tank tops, cutoff shorts, and lots of mustaches, all broomy and stiff — evidence I tangled with SWAT. I’m pulling my sneakers off to shake them out when I spot a rifle barrel sticking out of a Dumpster beside the station.
My poor Kruger. I shake a banana peel off the scope and try to clean coffee grounds out of the breech with a wet sock. Can I sink any lower? I decide right there to lay down my pride and squish out back to the bomb shed to see ROMS.
The bomb shed’s really just a nickname for a complex series of bunkers behind the station that house all the equipment we don’t want the media to know about. The walls are three feet thick and the ceiling is satellite proof, so this is where ROMS goes to hide out when his feelings are hurt.
When I reach the bottom of the stairs, ROMS is parked alone in the middle of a dark corridor where we store the blanket cannon, a device that fires sheets of steel wool at incredible velocities. The protesters call them “drapes of wrath,” but most everyone agrees there’s no faster way to induce good citizenship.
The air is damp and smells faintly of rust. ROMS has his screen saver on.
“Hey,” I say to him.
“You must be lost,” he answers. “Your new, cool friends aren’t here. Why don’t you check the SWAT Rec Room?”
“You know I don’t have any cool friends. I’m here to see you, man.”
This cheers ROMS up enough that his green light comes on. He smiles a bit, and I know it’s cowardly, but when he doesn’t say anything about the way I dogged him, neither do I.
“Heard you had quite a night last night. Tried to fight the whole SWAT team?”
“I keep screwing everything up,” I say.
“You know, Tim, turning to sodas and martial arts never solved anything.”
I hang my head at the truth of ROMS’s words. “Look, I need your help.”
ROMS grows serious. He points his dish at me.
“Okay. Tell me about it.”
“There’s this girl, and maybe I’m in love with her. But every time I try to talk to her, I turn into an idiot.”
ROMS starts to pace the room, rolling past bushels of finely wound laceration wire. He turns suddenly to face me.
“I have much experience in the realms of amour,” ROMS says. “My years in demolition and negotiation have taught me firsthand about the effects of love, with my specialties being rampages, revenge bombings, and murder-suicides.”
I sit on an empty canister of laxative gas. “Go ahead,” I say.
“Here are a couple tips. First, love and firearms don’t mix. That also goes for drugs, alcohol, or artificial stimulants.”
“Too late for that one.”
“Next, when making decisions in matters of love, avoid ledges, bridges, rooftops, towers, and open windows.”
“Strike two.”
“Most important,” and here he pauses. “Never, ever diss a friend over a girl.”
“Ouch,” I say. “Point taken. But those are all don’ts. I need the dos, man.”
ROMS thinks on this. He sniffs the vacant air as if for wisdom, then continues.
“To begin with,” he says, “She might be hungry. Supply her with pizza. People need food to make good decisions. Sharing food is also an ancient ritual of trust and friendship. Next, show your good faith — give her something, a gift perhaps, no strings. Then, open the lines of communication and be prepared to listen. Finally, give her space and time to make up her own mind, without any pressure. If all else fails, offer yourself in exchange.”
“In exchange for what?”
“Um,” ROMS says, “the hostages?”
“Hostages? There aren’t any hostages. You don’t know anything about love, do you? You don’t know the first thing.”
My voice cracks when I say this, and I tromp off.
* * *
The rest of the week is hard to take. Cedric and Henry quit the force to start snipers.com, a private “consulting” firm that provides just-in-time sniping to Silicon Valley companies. Because they do all their shooting in-house, everyone’s spared the media attention. Henry leaves me a note that reads, “He who hesitates, masturbates,” which is what the SWAT guys are always saying, and only too late do we realize that Cedric copied all our training videos and gave them to America’s Zaniest Sniper Bloopers.
Twan and I put in lots of overtime, which means I have to shoot all the females, and it gets to where I’m barely able to focus on the targets in my scope. Forget about replacement imagery — it’s everything I can do not to set the Kruger on autosnipe mode. Gupta gives me the silent treatment, and the Sniper Lounge is like a ghost town. My mom buys stock in Cedric’s IPO.
Then ROMS is killed in a blast at Ikea. It’s one of those savage detergent bombs. The explosion is broadcast live, and the video has the same color-leaked quality as my scope. ROMS lets out this sad little moan when he realizes he’s snipped the wrong wire, and knowing what’s coming, he turns himself off. He mutters something as his arms droop, his screen blips green, and all that’s left is a halo of static. Then his video feed stops. Flowers, I think. Flowers, flowers.