When Snowden opened his eyes again, he realized he was crying. Despite that, he could clearly see the solidified air bubbles in the bricks only inches away. A glance up (or down) and there was the room and guy in question, Snowden's view was inverted but otherwise lucent and unobstructed. There was a knocking at the base of his spine.
"What's he doing?" Snowden heard lightly behind him. He was sitting and watching the television, as foretold. He was a moron. It was evident to Snowden on first glance, even from looking upside down in the rain twenty feet away through the window. There was a reason for the descriptor slack jaw. There were simple etymologies for the words lumbering and blockhead, staring at this subject's profile, Snowden was struck with the notion that it had been carved from an uprooted stump with a butter knife. There was a Wednesday class, during the history portion months before, when Lester made mention of the days when white would-be scientists would stroll 135th Street trying to measure black people's skulls to prove the race's mental inferiority. Looking at the mug on the guy through the window, Snowden — so much blood rushing to his head he could smell it — wondered if anyone had ever tried to measure intelligence via facial expressions as well. It seemed so obvious an indicator to him, hanging there watching the look on this guy's face as he sat inches away from the television scooping handfuls of cereal from out of the box and shoving what he could fit into his mouth, letting the remainder fall to the floor in front of him.
"Now that it's aimed right at me, I have to say this: You've got a really lovely derriere," Lester told him.
"What?" Snowden started squirming, trying to pull himself up again. Lester laughed, slapped him lightly on the region in question.
"Oh come on, just a joke. Just a bit of humor to lighten the situation."
Maybe he just wants me to hang here, Snowden assured himself. Maybe it was as simple as making a phone call and whatever the Chupacabra wants to happen was put in motion and nothing more will be asked. Snowden decided that could be true, chose to ignore the gun that had become a part of his hand. There was an optimist deep inside Snowden. No one could be more surprised than Snowden himself, but there was an optimist deep inside him, hidden in some dark, warm, waterproof crevice. As Lester tugged on his back and Snowden began pulling himself back up, this internal optimist decided to make its voice heard. I've been in worse situations than this one, most definitely. See, it's over, I didn't fall. I haven't done anything really serious. I'm an innocent, it's true. I don't even know what's going on.
"Let me tell you what's going on," Lester whispered as soon as Snowden'd risen all the way back up. "In a minute the cops will be here, coming to this apartment, guns drawn. Mr. Trevor Barber down there goes to open the door thinking it's his pizza fix and as he does the cops get nervous and shoot him. End of story. We go back to the bar. I'll buy this time."
Snowden thought about the scheme for a moment, particularly its lack of demanded action and the fact that it was probably impossible to calculate the improbability of it unfolding successfully without a very large military grade computer, and offered Lester his unbounded enthusiasm and admiration for its construction.
"Aren't you going to ask why they're going to shoot him?" Lester wondered.
"No, no, I like the plan just the way it is, no need to question it. I mean, I'm sure the police officers have their own personal reasons, but why pry?" Snowden told him.
"Because as he goes to the door, you're going to shoot a hole through it. Don't worry, I knocked out the lightbulbs in the hallway and he keeps the light in the living room on, so when the officers hear the shot and see the hole glaring through the door, they'll get the picture."
Snowden got the picture too. The picture was that there was no way he was going to shoot the gun as suggested, so he began immediately setting up his excuse. "Hey man, I've never even shot a gun before. I'm nervous. What if I shoot him by mistake?"
"That's fine, the bullet should pass right through him and still do the job. The way his body should look at the end of this, no coroner will have reason to question it."
"But the cops, man. It ain't right, setting up the people sworn to protect this place. That's not the Horizon way." Snowden was suddenly excited by the discovery of a rational argument by which the irrational might be swayed. "That ain't right! I mean, did you even check this over with Congressman Marks. Congressman Marks has friends in the department."
"And those friends have enemies, and that's who's scheduled to show up tonight. Now be a good boy and bend over."
Snowden hung upside down over the edge of the building for six minutes, his sinuses taut and painful, his back aching and promising great reprisals if he ever tried to straighten out again. He knew six minutes had gone by because at the top of every one Lester complained about police tardiness, that someone should be there by now.
"This is deplorable. Really, what if an innocent really was being shot at? You think he'd have to wait this long on the Upper East Side?"
Lester was so busy complaining he didn't hear it when the downstairs door buzzer was finally rung. The dunce did. Snowden watched Barber rise from the couch holding his wallet, walking slowly backward so his eyes never had to leave the television screen, buzzing them in without even checking the intercom.
"Really, Snowden, do you think? Because I've never lived on the Upper East Side. What was that?" Lester asked. That was a bit of bad luck, because just as Snowden had begun to hope that the moron had his TV so loud that the police would come and go without Lester's knowledge, a moment's pause in the starship action gave the apartment's doorbell silence in which to assert itself.
"This is it, wait till he gets right in front of the door," the voice said from above Snowden. As if he could see the moment the subject stepped into the proposed line of fire, when the guy did Lester continued with, "Shoot it."
Snowden wanted to shoot himself. The guy he was now pointing the gun at, he only had one dirty white sock on. From behind, the brown crack of his ass peeked through his drooping sweatpants belligerently, threatening to go lunar with every step. It was a sad life he was watching, and it made his life seem that much sadder that this boar was worth risking it for. "The trigger, pull it or I'm dropping you!" Lester punched Snowden in the ass. Trevor Barber paused a yard from the door, stretched his head so far back Snowden became afraid he'd see him, and over top of the sound of screaming Klingon the man produced a fart so momentous even Lester heard it. Vicious abuser of the weak, unrepentant parasite of the downtrodden, now also freakishly flatulent: Snowden suddenly wanted to kill him. Even so, it wasn't until he could feel Lester starting to let go of his legs that Snowden fired the gun, and even then he waited until the moment the bastard got his door open and the cops had a chance to see him clearly.
Snowden aimed at the patch of dried dirt by the trash cans far below on the ground. He saw the cloud of dust when the bullet hit, then heard the echoes as the sound bounced off the backs of so many tenement walls. Then Snowden realized it wasn't echoes, and that was when he looked back in the window and saw Trevor Barber dancing, except that that wasn't dancing. That was getting shot. That was glass breaking on the back windows. That whining was the sound of bullets shooting by. That hot rain pouring onto Snowden's face was him peeing himself.
By the time Lester pulled him back up, Snowden's mind was as much a mess as his clothes. Lester tried to hug him, calm him down, but Snowden pushed the man away. The gun was not his friend, it was not a natural extension of his arm, and Snowden slammed it down in front of himself and as it bounced yelped in fear at what he'd just done. Lester just picked it up, then pulled Snowden by his arm out of there.