Somewhere in the house the female voice of a computer announced the time. It was nine p.m. and May knew she had to get a ten o’clock flight back to Sydney and her family, but there was something both poignant and faintly seductive about Seth’s grief. He was the kind of man that you wanted to comfort, to hold, even. . . .
“Thirty years, May, thirty years of happiness. What do I do now?” He asked softly.
PUSSY AND MOUSE
Where I live has kind of closed down the past two years, a little like me. I’ve closed down. I now wear my life on the inside, like a second, luminous skin no one else can see. Unless they know me another way. The only way. My name is Cassandra Whool. Kind of a fancy name for a 310-pound, thirty-eight-year-old woman you wouldn’t look at twice. I mean, hey, I wouldn’t look at me twice. But I guess my parents didn’t know that when they named me. Cassandra, I believe, was some crazy Greek mystic. There ain’t nothing mystic or mysterious about me, except in my head. In my imagination.
I live in Southern California, in a new development north of San Diego. We were one of the first to move in five years ago. It consists of rows and rows of small white stucco houses, each with identical garages and a small yard at the back. It’s gated and just off the I-5 freeway. They call it the Greenways Community, which is surprising to me because I ain’t seen much community except for the FedEx guy and the Mormons who sometimes knock on my door, and since the drought there’s nothing much green except the golf course next door.
I moved in with my mom, but she passed three years ago, leaving me with a forty-thousand-dollar mortgage and a room full of them porcelain heritage dolls that she collected. I have no other family except one sister who lives in Encinitas—she married a hippie artist and now has seven children. We argued about God years ago and I ain’t seen her since, except for Mom’s funeral. None of her kids have amounted to anything, ’cept for the youngest, Seth, who’s living in Australia. Seth. I used to babysit him before me and my sister quarreled. Cute kid. Now it’s like I’m alone since Mom died. I still ain’t cleared out her bedroom and her clothes are still hanging in her closet. Sold the dolls, though. I hated them dolls. But Mom, she left a hole in this house like a runaway train. Sometimes when I’m sitting here in the evening I hear her calling out from her bedroom. It’s the strangest thing.
Like I said before, around here things have kind of closed down. People are losing their homes, their houses repossessed before they even have time to put their own furniture into the place. It’s getting ugly and I’m happy I have kept my job, thank the good Lord. I mean, it ain’t a career, but it’s a living, a place where I get money for just answering the phone—but that’s more than most folks have got these days.
The Tolgate Call Center, head office, La Mesa, Southern California, is where I work. It’s called the head office because I guess it once was the head office. Now it’s about the last call center left in the United States of America. The rest of them have moved to Mumbai or Delhi or one of them places that are economically blossoming, while here in God’s own they’re saying Capitalism is dying with a big groan and a small c. As if I care.
My workplace? It’s a big old building in the back of a shopping mall that looks like every other shopping mall north of the Mexican border. In other words, a large, anonymous concrete building, open plan, with about a hundred of us at our switchboards, headphones on, answering them calls from all over the country. Plastic palm trees inside, real ones outside. But the building has air-conditioning and the job health insurance and the boss is a relaxed kind of guy. The partitions around my desk are placed so that my computer is concealed from the other workers. I am the only one there to have a third partition. This is my privilege as the longest-serving employee. Twelve years I’ve been answering phones in that building, day shift only. I even have a plaque on my desk that reads “Cassandra Whool, C.C. La Mesa, employee of the decade”—C.C. standing for call center of course, but the dumb thing is that I am the only employee of the decade, considering the other workers that come through only last six months or maybe a year. There’s too much echo coming off the white walls, bouncing back all their personal grief and misery for most folk. See, I have something they don’t. I have Second Life.
Second Life is where I do my living: every lunchtime and from seven to eleven every night at home. Why, I even eat my dinner in front of the computer screen, but that being said, putting real-life food into my real-life body is secondary to booting up the computer. In truth booting up is more important. That machine is my window into happiness, into forgetting myself. Since I became a member of the Second Life community on May 13, 2006, my real life has faded away into periods of gray time, of waiting until I log on again. Second Life is my ecstasy and my salvation. It allows this great hefty body of mine to escape gravity, to soar. It gives me a portal through which there is hope, light, color, and best of all—sex. Yep, you heard me, sex: great, forbidden, pornographic dreamscapes in which I am queen and hallelujah to that.
Okay, I can hear you all preaching at me already. I mean for all I know you could be a born-again Christian or even a charismatic. Lord knows there’s enough of them around here, but the way I see it is that a woman is a woman. And even if she don’t look like it, don’t think there ain’t a thread of desire in her. Call it sin, call it what you like, but that drum is gonna keep beating. And what could I do? I ain’t had a man since 1990, and that was a drunken one-night stand. I’d given up even talking to the opposite sex with any romantic intention because I’m a realist—no man is going to take on a big heifer like me, not in this world anyway. I wanted to meet people, but not like this, not like me in real life—IRL.
It started innocently enough. I think my first visit to Second Life was to Holiday Paradise Island, kind of like a futuristic Club Med where everyone is beautiful, slim, and young, and some of them even had tails and wings, but everyone was kind of nice and friendly—and best of all, no judgment. My avatar was cute but she was no great shakes. So when I was approached for sex, I could not wait. I immediately went to Xcite and got me some genitals and nipples and upgraded my skin. And suddenly that thread of desire in me began to take shape and became my avatar now—Tasinis—everything I am not in real life. Let me put you in the picture: the real me, Cassandra Whool, has short brown hair that is too thin to grow long, small brown eyes, and pasty skin that is discolored by large sun spots. My mouth is my best feature but at my size it’s kind of buried by my cheeks. My dress size is 22, I can’t remember the last time I saw my feet, my breasts hang down to my waist, and I’m five foot one inch tall.
The “skin” that I originally used to construct Tasinis cost me over four thousand Lindens and I got a Second Life artist to design her specially to my instructions. My avatar is six foot tall, with waist-length strawberry-blond hair that flows down in those Barbie doll waves. She has wide hips, a narrow waist, broad shoulders, and DD breasts. I gave her super long legs with the latest Xcite interactive thighs, which cost me half a week’s pay. I’ve also got Tasinis a special edition clit and long X3 nipples that can actually get erect. Finally I gave her this really sexy deep voice, kind of like Aretha Franklin meets Eartha Kitt—with a growl. Okay, some might find her kind of a gender bender, but I like it. It’s the kind of voice that makes men hard and the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. Constructing Tasinis was like playing God. It was like giving bir
th. It was the most creative thing I have ever done in my whole miserable goddamn life. I swear it.
I had five outfits designed for her but my favorite is an armor-like corset that cuts above her thighs, exposing her crotch and ass, and thigh-high stiletto-heeled leather boots with silver spurs that can convert into small silver wings. There’s a clip-on belt she wears on special occasions that has pockets for Xcite toys such as a silver dildo, a small silver-handled whip, steel handcuffs, and an Xcite Violet Wand. The only nonhuman addition I gave her was a small pair of silver horns that poke up through her thick blond hair. I’m telling you, she is mighty fine looking.
Tasinis is twenty-three—she hasn’t had a birthday since I enabled her three years ago, while in real life I’m thirty-eight going on fifty. And I can’t remember the last time I stood in front of the mirror naked. In truth I can’t remember the last time I was aware of feeling anything more than cold and warmth on my human skin. In Second Life Tasinis orgasms all the time, which is ironic because I don’t reckon I’ve ever had an orgasm—not by myself, not with anyone else IRL, not once. I mean, it’s not like I don’t feel anything. I get excited when Tasinis comes, but my body—well, it’s asleep, dormant like some huge hibernating animal that’s never been woken up. Maybe I don’t like myself enough to let go. You know, even when I was young I found the feel of my own body revolting. I’ve never even masturbated. I tried once in the shower when I was about sixteen, but Mom walked into the bathroom and told me I was committing a sin. It was real traumatic. I started to eat big after that. It was like I was punishing her by not growing into one of those perfect petite china dolls she collected. Wow, I’ve never told anyone that, not ever. Now I’m making up for it big time through Tasinis, through my avatar. And, Mom, if you’re up there in heaven I hope you can hear this, because my Tasinis is the most sinful kick-ass dirty-chick doll you’re ever gonna see. And she has no trouble pleasuring herself—or anyone else, for that matter. I even gave her labia that light up when she’s aroused to let the other avatars know. I made her the goddamn sexiest avatar in the whole wide Second Life, and it worked. She’s a star, a cyber idol, while out here in the real world I am less and less visible. I mean, hey, I could die of a heart attack in my bed one day and I don’t reckon anyone would come looking, but if Tasinis left the net there would be a riot. I swear it. She is that famous.
I’ll never forget the day I introduced her to the dark side of Second Life. I clicked on Gothic Dungeon Sex Island and flew Tasinis in. As soon as I saw her there floating like a huge love goddess in the perfect blue sky, I was her. A horde gathered to watch me as I hovered over the dark forest that stood in front of a gothic castle, breasts heaving and long blond hair undulating in the cyber wind like tendrils. It was Kali meets Barbie and the Ice Queen all in the same massive sex doll, and it felt like total power, total adoration. And for somebody who was used to people averting their eyes from them, this was enormous; it was the nearest thing to love I’d ever experienced.
I made Tasinis yell, “I have arrived!” and the crowd roared. She didn’t even make it to the huge wooden front door; I couldn’t resist all those arms reaching out for her. I floated her down and let them pull her to the ground. In seconds Tasinis was involved in a group orgy that was a hundred times more exciting than anything I’d thought up in my imagination. It was kind of shocking yet thrilling. It was like civilization stripped back to the bone, to raw instinct. But I wised up. Next time I visited the island I equipped Tasinis with a whip twirling wildly in one hand and a nightstick raised in the other. Immediately several avatars flung themselves down, begging Tasinis to flagellate them. I’ve never felt so powerful or so wanted. That pure feeling of control and dominance charged through me as I sat at my desk, my waistband cutting into my belly, the loose T-shirt hanging down to my knees to conceal my weight, the heat sticking the cotton to my back and armpits.
It had been a really bad morning—some of the workers were away sick and the boss had shouted at me—but I swear, when I logged on to Second Life that lunchtime, watching Tasinis standing victorious over the other groveling avatars, the curling lash of her whip coming down again and again, was the most sexually exciting thing that had ever happened to me. It was like I was finally somebody. I was finally visible.
Just before I left for home that day my boss came in to tell me he had taken on a night worker who was to share my desk. “A guy called Hector Lopez, a Latino, a nice guy. A loner like you; I think his wife’s passed recently. Not that you’ll ever get to meet him,” he joked.
• • •
Lately I’ve been spending more than six hours a day on Second Life, on Xcite and Gothic Dungeon Sex Island. Maybe I have an addiction, but hey, it’s not like I’m doing drugs or crime. All I can think about is getting back inworld, to the chains, the whipping posts, the pain/pleasure on my victims’ faces, the flashing pose balls, and the creak of the dungeon doors played over and over again. Tasinis has become top bitch, the ultimate dominatrix. Folks fly in from all parts of Second Life just to be whipped by her. There is even a fan club that meets every month to exchange stories. And last month a Second Life rock star named Lassorow composed a song about Tasinis; it’s number five on the Second Life charts.
But the really weird thing is that I should feel good, I should be firing, but lately when I’ve gone in I haven’t got the same kicks watching my avatar blindfold and humiliate some blond avatar, erect penis flashing. Something’s missing. I feel it and Tasinis feels it.
• • •
The night worker who shares my desk, this Hector Lopez, he starts at seven p.m. and then leaves at five a.m. I start at nine a.m. and leave at five p.m. We haven’t met and we won’t ever meet. I can’t get a read on him, and why should I, given that he’s nothing but a seat warmer. There’s nothing on the desk that’s personal. Nothing. Unless you count my collection of souvenir pencils with different sands in them I bought in Tijuana. But he hasn’t messed with my things. To me he is like a shadow, someone who flitters across my space and is forgotten by the morning. Of course, no one at work, including Hector, knows about Tasinis or what I’m like on Second Life. I only ever play on my laptop and I take it everywhere I go.
So there was this day and it would have been like any other day in that I got up and ate my usual oatmeal, maple syrup, and blueberries, ’cept when I looked at the calendar on the fridge I realized it was my birthday. “Shoot,” I said to myself. “Cass, there’s no one left to know that since Mom died three years ago,” and it promised to be another hollow, dry sort of day only maybe a little sadder.
So while I was stuck on I-5 in my clapped-out Honda Civic between Escondido and Carmel Valley I got to thinking about what might be waiting for me that afternoon on Second Life and how in my real life lately I’d started to dream from Tasinis’s point of view like I was actually trapped in there, in her body, those long legs floating above the ground, my skin so smooth, so soft and tight, like I was agile, taut like I imagine an athlete might feel. And I/Tasinis, we were swinging that whip but there was no heart left, nothing but a faint curiosity, like maybe we’d tortured one too many, like all them chisel-jawed, big-dicked avatars with their cheesy come-on lines like “Give it to me, big mama” had started to look the same, even the ones with the wings, the tails, and the hermaphrodite options. Then my freeway exit came up and before I knew it I was at work again, parking in the parking lot along with a hundred other workers, with the morning sun already coming down like thin white knives, burning the back of the brain, and then I was at my desk answering the phone, my mind on automatic, like some friggin’ sleepwalker waiting to be woken up, a junkie hanging out for her fix, a baby screaming for her mother’s milk, until five came around and I knew as soon as I logged on I would be alive again.
• • •
Gothic Dungeon Sex Island: 18.03 6/30/09
Tasinis is perched on a rafter of the Dungeon, long legs swinging, just observing the scene unfurling below. I’m in the zone, like there is no time here, and if there was, I reckon it would pass real slowly. There are three pose balls in the area, two blue and one red. In the sawdust-covered arena below, several avatars are tied by the wrists to whipping posts, two male avatars and one female. An avatar with dark skin, dragon wings, and a ridiculously huge black cock stands in the center, his arm holding a long whip that repeatedly descends with a jerking motion when the tail of his whip catches the buttocks of the three prisoners. Automated cries sound out from one of the men and the young girl; the second man seems to have the wrong sound pack attached, as shrill female yelps of pleasure appear to be coming from his wagging genitals. Time to make myself known.