Shadow Man

'Leo. Leo Carnes. I'm on loan here because of the e-mail, but also because of what your friend did for a living.'

I give him a good once-over. He returns my gaze without flinching. He's a good-looking kid, probably twenty- four or twenty-five. Dark hair, calm eyes. 'Which was what? You said I wasn't accurate. So explain it to us.'

He moves up a few seats nearer to us; invited into the inner circle, he leaps at the opportunity. Everyone wants to belong. 'It's kind of a long explanation.'

'We have the time. Go ahead.'

He nods, a gleam coming to his eye that I recognize as excitement. Computers are his thing, what he is passionate about. 'To understand it, you have to understand that pornography on the Internet is an entirely different subculture from pornography in the 'real world.' ' He's settling back, relaxing, getting ready to give a lecture on a subject he knows everything about. It's his moment in the spotlight, and I'm happy to let him have it. It gives me time to settle my thoughts and my stomach. And something to think about besides little Bonnie, staring at her dead mother's face for three days.

'Go on.'

'Starting in around 1978, you had something called BBSs--Bulletin Board Systems. Actually the full name was Computerized Bulletin Board Systems. These were the first nongovernment, public-accessible networks. If you had a modem and a computer, you could post up messages, do file sharing, and so on. Of course, back then, almost all the users were scientists or supernerds. But the reason this is relevant is that BBSs became a place to post up porn pics. You could share them, trade them, whatever. And at this point, we're not just talking Wild West, we are talking undiscovered country. No oversight, nada. Something important to porn users because--'

James chimes in: 'It was free, and it was private.'

Leo grins and bobs his head. 'Exactly! You didn't have to sneak in the back of some porno shop and brown- bag it. You could lock your bedroom door and download your porno pics without fear of discovery. It was HUGE. So, BBSs were the only public game in town, and they were everywhere, and porn was already everywhere on them.

'BBSs pretty much drop away as the Internet evolves and Web sites start coming out, and browsers, and dot-com names, and all that stuff. BBSs were always basically for posting, with the viewing being done after download. Now you have Web sites, where you can see it as fast as you connect to it. So what happens with porn?' He smiles. 'What actually happened is twofold: You had some smart businessmen--I'm talking guys who already had money--who started to develop adult Web sites on the Net. Some were from the audiotext industry--'

'Which is what?' I interrupt.

'Sorry. Phone sex. These guys who were already raking in the dough on phone sex saw the Web and realized its potential for porn. Private, pay-per-view, on-demand whack-off material for the everyday guy. They poured a bunch of money into buying existing pornography. Pics scanned in by the hundreds of thousands and posted up on Web sites. In order to view them, you had to whip out your credit card. And that is where things changed in porn.'

Callie frowns. 'What do you mean, changed?'

'I'm getting to that. See, up to that point, porn was pretty much a

'hands on' kind of thing. If you were selling videos, for example, you were up to your neck in the industry. In other words, you'd been on movie sets, seen sex going on in front of you, knew the people, maybe even been in front of the camera yourself. It's always been a very tight, small group. But with Web sites, these early guys, they were a whole new breed. There was a layer between them and the actual creation of the stuff. They had money, and they paid the pornographers for their pics.

They put them up on the Web and charged to view them. You see the difference? These guys weren't pornographers, not in the classical sense. They were businessmen. With marketing plans, offices, staff, the whole nine yards. They weren't coming across as some sleazy substrata of society anymore. And it paid off. Some of those first companies make eighty to a hundred million a year now.'

'Wow,' Callie says. Leo nods.

'Yeah, wow. It may not seem like a big deal to us, but if you really dig into the history of porn, it was a paradigm shift. To be honest? Most of the people making porn in the early eighties were from the seventies. We're talking a lot of drugs, promiscuous sex, all the cliches. But these new Internet guys? Most of them weren't involved in wife swapping or snorting coke while getting a blow job, any of that. Most of them had never been on a porn set in their life. They were guys in business suits, making millions off the newest thing. They started to make it, well, respectable. As much as porn can be.'

'You said 'twofold.' What's the other part of it?'

'While these business guys were carving out their empires, you had another whole 'adult revolution' happening. This was at a more grassroots level. Rather than Web sites that were a collection of pics of professional porn stars, you had women or couples creating Web sites that were centered around themselves and their real-life sexual escapades. These weren't people trying to make a living off porn. These were people doing it for fun. Getting off on the exhibitionism of it. It was called

'amateur porn.' '

Callie rolls her eyes. 'You're not talking to babes in the woods here, honey-love. I think most of us know what amateur porn is. The 'girl next door,' swingers, blah blah blah.'

'Sure, sorry. I'm in lecture mode. The relevance is, the demand for that type of porn turned out to be just as big as the demand for 'pro porn.' So much so that most of these women or couples couldn't afford to keep it up for free, as a hobby. The costs of having their Web sites accessed by so many people became prohibitive. So they started charging as well. A few of those who started early on made millions. And--and this is the key thing you have to understand--these were not pornindustry people. They didn't know anyone in the adult-video industry. They weren't in magazines, or in videos in adult bookstores. These were people driven first not by money but by the enjoyment of what they were doing.

'Whether or not you or I think this is a healthy way to be, the truth is, it created an entirely new demographic within the porn industry. Moms and dads, members of the PTA. All the while having a secret life and raking in the dough showing themselves off to the world.' He turns to me. 'So, what I meant when I said you weren't accurate is just that. I saw your friend's Web site. She did soft-core stuff--as in no sex. She did masturbate and use sex toys and . . . stuff like that. She charged for viewing it, and I don't necessarily approve--but she wasn't a hooker.' He fumbles with his words for a moment. 'I mean, I don't know if that'll help you, when you think about it, but . . .'

I give him a tired smile. Close my eyes. 'It's a lot to take in, Leo. I'm not sure how I feel about any of it. But, yeah. It helps.'

My mind is spinning, spinning, spinning. I think about Annie, posing nude as a chosen profession. I wonder about the secrets people keep. She was always beautiful, always a little wild. I would not have been surprised by any number of sexual secrets. But this--this throws me for a loop. Partly because I am unsure of my own ambivalence about it. A picture floats into my mind, sudden and unbidden. Matt and I were both twenty-six. The sex we were having that year could only be called spectacular. No area of our home was unchristened. No position had been left untried. My lingerie collection had grown by leaps and bounds. Best of all, none of this was happening because we were working at it. We weren't trying to 'spice things up'--things were just spicy all by themselves. We were drunk on each other, cavorting with horny abandon.

I was always the more sexually adventurous of the two of us. Matt tended to be more conservative and quiet. But like they say: Still waters run deep. He could follow my lead into dark territories without hesitation. He'd howl full-throated at the moon right beside me. It's one of the things I loved about him. He was a wonderful, gentle man. But he could shift gears when I needed him to, could be rough and dark and a little dangerous. He was always my hero. But . . . when I needed a little bit of villain, Matt would provide.

We were a modern-day couple. We watched naughty movies together every now and then. I'm the one who would drag him into perusing some of the adult sites on occasion. Always on his screen name. Even though I was Big Brother, I was paranoid about Big Brother. I couldn't afford to tarnish the image of the FBI. So Matt's screen name was the one looking at all the dirty pictures. I'd tease him about this, calling him the pervert in the marriage.

We also had a digital camera. One night during this year, while he was at the store, the impulse struck me. I stripped off my clothes and took a few naked photos of myself from the neck down. Heart pounding, giggling like a