Private Eyes

I don't mean to sound callous, but the height of the global pandemic was a wonderful time for me. I face special challenges on a daily basis that the symptoms of that plague, and your collective response to them, practically erased overnight. Not only has it become possible to do almost anything (buy, sell, trade, seduce, compel) online, but doing so has become fashionable, sleek and efficient. I have not been obliged to leave my home for years, nor have I had to tolerate the excruciating ritual of a face to face encounter with an ordinary human being in at least that long, excluding special clients.

I understand that suffering and death on a grand scale were the consequences of this crisis, and I regret that so many endured such grim trials at the hands of an invisible assailant, but let me be frank: life for me and those like me was mostly purgatorial before the pandemic, and has become something of a paradise in its wake.

We all survive somehow. I survive by turning a curse into a cure for the ills of others. Specifically, I have the power to exact revenge on behalf of women like me, who have been wronged and ache for justice. Long ago, I offended my boss by engaging in conduct she deemed inappropriate in her place of business. My punishment was horrific and its effects are as potent and monstrous today as they were when she decided to put me in my place.

For years, I decided grimly to live with my punishment by becoming just the sort of revolting pariah my former employer wanted to make me. Incidentally, like most of her ilk, she was happy to endorse, and even gossip and giggle about, the laissez faire sexual mores of executives like herself. Her remarks about what went on between the head of engineering and the head of beauty and cosmetics, while she watched, curled my toes and curdled my blood, to point out only one star in a gawdy galaxy.

But when I, an ordinary, public facing employee, had a dalliance in her office with one of her fellow executives, that was it. Her wrath was volcanic. It made me what I am today, and perversely, I am grateful to her for making me into a perfect instrument of righteous retribution.

Granted, I still can't look anyone in the eye without disastrous consequences. Every relationship I try to create in the flesh is over the moment it begins. My most intimate moments are shared with mere simulacra, you know, copies without originals. Your press is full of pearl clutching hysteria about the proliferation of paraphilias: virtual bodice ripping romances with bots and algorithmically generated ghosts. I understand and empathize with those who flit bashfully into these electronic fly traps for the heart. Being with your kind, face to face, is hard. For me, it's dangerous and typically deadly.

However, when I want a filet mignon and an octogenarian pinot noir, I press a few buttons on what you risibly misidentify as a phone, and they appear at the door of my private elevator in a blink. I never see the person who brings them to me and soon enough, it will be a drone. Contactless is an ugly adjective. I know how powerful ugliness can be.

The same goes for whatever else I need or want: clothing and furniture and groceries and the trivial ephemera one needs to endure another day of bodily being all appear without any eye contact. Music and art and literature can all crawl to me across your web instantaneously. Hephaestus must be impressed with your tech.

For example, I listened to my favorite actor--Sir Ian McKellen--read my favorite literary masterpiece--Homer's Odyssey--aloud last night while I floated in a sunken marble tub full of fresh tiger lilies and Madagascar coconut milk. The Fagles translation helps to hone my conversational English and I no longer pine for the lyre music of the Attic Greek, my mother tongue. When I reluctantly left the tub, I had a delicious encounter with Ananya.

Ananya is to the ordinary masseuse what a chef with multiple, Michelin stars is to a line cook in a failing diner. She is congenitally blind. She has exquisite hearing, but I wear a black turban when she's here to keep things quiet.

She has the hands of a concert pianist and a paranoiac's sensitivity. She has never violated my strict admonition to avoid everything above my neck as she plays my every nerve and muscle like Paganini playing an antique violin.

I used to hate my body. Thanks to Ananya, I glow with glad thanks for its existence for hours after we part. I tip her with outrageous largesse, and she loves me for it. We typically chat about politics while she kneads my buttocks. She calls me a Groucho Marxist, which skillfully sums up my ideological affinities. It all reads as farce from the right height. Like Theseus, most of your heroes are smaller and nastier than their reputations.

After Ananya slipped away, I logged on. My client list is diverse. From a maid raped by a senator to a stripper impregnated and abandoned by a tech tycoon to an Olympic skier violated by her smug trainer, I have a sorority of sorrow to minister to and I take my duties seriously. My fees would give Bezos a stroke.

No one has ever requested a refund or complained about my work, though. If men go on being men, I will live in this private palace for centuries, and Ananya will afford generations of her large family a life that will embarrass and astonish them. She has a talented niece who inherited her blindness whom she will train to succeed her, though I'm sure it will be like watching The Phantom Menace after The Empire Strikes Back for me, at least at first. Her nephew just applied to a PhD program in Classics at Sapienza University in Rome. He will never have to fret about tuition or living expenses. I love asking her about his exploits.

What was most problematic at first was finding a discrete, private vendor for my esoteric works. I need absolute anonymity and compensation in cryptocurrency that is as nimble and impossible to trace as a ninja. I called in a favor or two--a former client who now works with the Large Hadron Collider, whose lusty physics tutor currently adorns a small garden behind the Portuguese ambassador to Spain's villa in Marbella, was especially helpful--and was introduced to Rowan. He's an art dealer with a gleaming list of premier clients, a serious heroin problem and a fondness for Jamaican men. I trust him and he trusts me. We've seen each others' stains. He sold my last piece for 4.3 million at a shadowy online auction. I am fond of Rowan.

My methods are unorthodox, but no one can match the verisimilitude of my work. Michelangelo's efforts look like those of a copier with low toner by comparison. My sculptures are not sculptures, after all.

Instead, I wait for some sister more sinned against than sinning to track me down on the dark web. I read her story, scrupulously checking the facts and demanding reliable documentation in the process. Two of my former clients are federal judges, one in Montreal and the other in Oslo. They know how to nail frauds, and will owe me little favors for as long as they live.

I then arrange to bring their assailants to me. Violators never consider the diabolical education they give their victims. The sisters show me just how to bait the trap in a way that will cause their assailants to drool, especially when I offer to cover the target's travel expenses for our first rendezvous. Some of it is generic. More than once, I've had to promise shocking things. Given my experience with the Olympian executives, though, no appetite or inclination gives me much pause. No contemporary CEO dreams of perpetrating sexual violence disguised as a swan.

Once they see me, it's done. There is never any violence, so there is never any evidence. They just aren't themselves anymore. People vanish all of the time, even in the preposterous postmodern panopticon you call the world.

I withdraw, summon Drew, who has been my fixer for forty years, and my work is crated, rolled to the private elevator and shipped off to Rowan to be coveted by weird, wealthy aesthetes. I send an encrypted JPEG to my client and await electronic payment via Banque Privée Edmond de Rothschild. I work for about thirty minutes a month.

A gorgon's life can be gorgeous. All villains should get stoned.