objects mounted there. They reminded me of Joseph Cornell boxes and I walked closer and knelt for a better view. A chill went through me.
“She calls them reliquaries, bro,” Todd said. “She makes them by hand, and there’s one for each of her videos, but I’d wait until afterward to look at them. They make more sense, and the impact is…bigger.”
I looked at Chaz and he nodded. “It’s a context issue,” he said, and he swallowed some beer.
I nodded back and took a seat behind Chaz. Todd hit the lights and the room went black and I wondered what context would make sense of what I’d seen behind the glass.
11
“You don’t want a real drink?” Chaz Monroe asked me. “Because you look like you could use one.”
“Ginger ale is fine,” I said. Monroe shrugged and wedged into the pack at the bar to order. In fact, he had a point. I felt wobbly and somehow disoriented, and the walk from Todd Herring’s house to Smith Street had made no dent in that. “Like nothing else I’ve seen,” Ricky had said. Ricky hadn’t lied.
I found an empty table in a corner of the crowded room and slid along the green banquette. Monroe wasn’t long in coming and he handed me my drink and took the seat opposite. He tilted his glass to mine.
“To art, bro,” he said ironically. He swallowed some scotch and gave me a speculative look. “So, what did you think?”
I shook my head. “Are they all like that?”
“The particulars are different, but the narrative arc is the sameall the ones I’ve seen, anyway: the e-mail, the first meeting, the dominance and submission, the investigation, and the final interrogation.”
“Do you ever see the men’s faces?”
Monroe shook his head. “They’re always digitally masked, the faces and anything else that might identify them- scars, tattoos, that kind of thing. And their voices are distorted. It depersonalizes themdestroys their individuality and turns them into objects, into nothing more than their desires and demands. At least, until you start feeling sorry for the poor fucks.”
“But you always see Cassandra?”
“All there is to see- and you always hear her voice too. Nothing masked there.”
Not much, I thought, and shook my head. “Jesus,” I said.
“Indeed,” Monroe said, and he drank off the rest of his scotch. “Too quick,” he sighed. “Another soda for you, or maybe something stronger?” I declined and he headed for the bar. I looked into my glass and thought again about the videos. It wasn’t easy to do, but it was impossible to stop.
They were each about fifty minutes long, and they both began with hand-held, documentary-style camera work- close-up, fidgety images of printed e-mail. The To and From fields, and any other information that could have identified sender or receiver, were redacted with thick black lines, and the messages themselves were brief- guarded, two- or three-line responses to an on-line personal ad. A woman’s voice read the text as the camera panned across the pages. Flat and emotionless as it was, I recognized it from David’s cell phone. Wren.
The first video, Interview Two, cut from the e-mail to hidden camera footage taken at tabletop level in a blurry bar or cafГ©. There was a man at the table with Cassandra, and I came to think of him as Skinny. His face was a mass of flesh-toned pixels, and his speech was synthesized and mechanical. But for the expensive tailoring, he could’ve been a government informant or the emcee on some hostage video.
“Late afternoon works for me- five-thirty or six… I’m not into drugs, and if you are, we can stop right here… I like to talk while we…you know.”
The robot voice seemed at first too deep for Skinny’s narrow frame, and too detached for the awkward situation. But after a while, it was the human bits that remained in his speech- the coughs and sighs and breathing, the pauses and small stutters- that seemed out of place.
For her part, Cassandra was demure throughout. She nodded agreement to nearly everything Skinny said, and when she spoke, her words were few and just above a whisper.
“I have a room a few blocks from here. Would you like to go now?”
And then came the sex.
It began without segue, in a dim hotel room with yellow light spilling from an open bathroom door and bleeding through a tiny gap in the drapes. The images were fuzzy and the visual style was amateur Internet porn: greenish, ghostly figures, the weightless movements of moonwalkers, and nothing left to the imagination. Eventually, I realized that the scene was actually several scenes, a montage of many late afternoons, and I realized there was a progression to the sex: from the more to the less conventional. From the variety of the angles, I guessed Cassandra must have had three cameras hidden around the room, and with them she captured a full catalogue of trajectories and thrusts. Through it all Skinny called the shots, tentatively at first, and then without reservation.
“You like that, don’t you…” “You want it there…” “Tell me you want it there…” “Say it like you mean it…” “Say it again, bitch.”
The soundtrack was dominated by his synthesized commands and exhortations, and by his unadulterated panting, grunts, and huffing. The unprocessed sounds were startling in their intimacy, and more unsettling than his words.
Beneath Skinny’s dictates and the other noises he made, Cassandra’s voice was a leitmotif of gasping obedience. She did what Skinny told her to do and said what he told her to say, and when he told her to say it again, she did. She moaned and cried out and pleaded, sometimes in pleasure and sometimes not, and her white, limber body bent and twisted beneath Skinny’s cubist face. Her own icon’s face, when it was visible, was pale and empty-eyed.
What Monroe had called the investigation segment began with what seemed a pause in the sex montage, and with a gradual change in the sound and look of the video. The commands and moaning faded away, and the noise of a running shower grew louder. Colors bled from the screen and were replaced by a smoky black and white. The tang of seedy sex dissipated and a sweaty paranoia took its place.
The bathroom door was opened wide and Cassandra was alone on the wrecked bed. Her naked body was luminous but her movements were stiff and achy as she rose and moved to a chair, to a jacket hanging there, to a pocket and a wallet inside. She looked over her shoulder as she rifled through the wallet and withdrew some cards. She held them to the camera lens, and though their surfaces were masked it was plain that they were credit cards and business cards. I’d thought of David when I saw it. My wallet was in my suit jacket…
I’d thought of him again as the scene shifted to another blurry interior and a shot of Cassandra, dressed now and hunched above a telephone. Skinny’s wind-up voice was distant on the other end, but the fear and anger in his words were close at hand and unmistakable.
“Don’t call here, for chrissakes…” “How did you get this number, you crazy bitch…” “Why are you calling me…” “What do you want from me…” “Fucking bitch- I’ll kill you, you call again…” “Just leave me alone…” “Please…just leave me alone.”
But she wouldn’t. I’d heard Cassandra’s side of the conversation before, on David’s voicemail. Her words were different in the video but she covered the same scary ground, and she was relentless.
“Why don’t you write me anymore? Why don’t you call? You think you can just ignore me? If you won’t take my calls, maybe your wife will.”
Their back-and-forth was a tortured accompaniment to more images of Cassandra on the telephone, and to shots of a blur-faced Skinny walking the streets, hailing taxis, entering and leaving unidentifiable buildings, and completely unaware of the camera trailing him. In the course of maybe ten minutes of video, his initial surprise gave way to anger, his anger mutated to fear, and his fear dissolved in desperation. By the end of it, Skinny’s synthesized words were lost in human sounds- quavers, sniffles, maybe tears- and I was surprised by the bud of sympathy that had grown for the bastard.
“Just leave my wife out of it, for chrissakes. Please, she’s got nothing to do with this- nothing at all. Just tell me what the hell you want from me. Please…”
Finally Cassandra did:
“I want to see you again, one last time.”
