Yearn (23 page)

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.

I leap down from the rafters, my long blond hair streaming up behind me as I fly through the air. I land, strong interactive thighs parted for action.

“Welcome, Mistress Tasinis. I am your slave, your love pump puppy,” Hercules10, one of the male avatars tied to the whipping post, the one with the steel cock ring, says, his disconcertingly high-pitched voice emerging suddenly from my laptop speakers.

“Utter not a word, you filthy dog; I will make you howl,” I instruct Tasinis to growl back while prodding him with my Xcite Violet Wand. Over and over, harder and harder.

“Ouch! Ouch! Ohh, ohh!” he whimpers, showing his appreciation by flashing little lightning streaks that strobe up and down his erect member. I make Tasinis yawn. Her indifference drives him crazy. Suddenly in real life a gardener walks past my window with a noisy leaf blower. I get up and pull down the blind. The sound fades away but the spell is almost broken.

By the time I shuffle back to my desk there's a new visitor to the dungeon, an avatar I haven't seen before. He's slim and tall like all the others, but there's something different about him I don't recognize at first. And then I get it—there are some deliberate flaws in his “skin.” For example, his nose and mouth are both slightly crooked, and his hair, instead of the usual generic perfection of Second Life, is uneven, long and messy. In stark contrast to his physical features, he appears to be dressed in an expensive suit, made by one of the top designers in Second Life. He looks like he's wandered into the wrong area. This is really confusing, as Second Lifers all know it requires both money and motivation to access the Xcite adult locations; no one just stumbles in.

I'm curious; this contrived naïveté is kind of sexy. I touch my mouse and move Tasinis closer. She/I look down at him from the height of her five-inch spiked boots. I say nothing.

The new avatar appears a little nervous and his arms flutter up and down like his operator doesn't quite know what to do with him. He looks around with an almost ironic expression, then suddenly sits on a blue pose ball. Immediately the pose ball's animated sexual instructions begin as the avatar is thrown into one sexual position after another. The first has him on all fours; at the second command he leaps to his feet and starts gyrating his crotch; finally he sticks his tongue out and starts waggling it suggestively. “Hi, I am Starboy 8 and I would like to suck your cock. . . .” He appears to be talking to me. “I mean clit. No, I mean . . . DAMN IT!” The words flash in the instant messenger box as the newcomer struggles with the technicalities of cybering. I peer closer. It seems Starboy 8's creator hasn't bothered buying the software to give him a voice and the avatar is reduced to communicating the old-fashioned way, via voice messenger. I guess he is a greenhorn to the whole Second Life experience and has decided to go play with the big boys without learning how to catch first.

Just then Starboy 8 leaps up off the pose ball and appears to wobble slightly on his feet. I make Tasinis stride over to him. His face is at breast height, so to make him feel more at ease I erect her nipples as if the sight of him has aroused her. This is a compliment in Xcite world but unfortunately one of them looks like it's poking him straight in the eye. Confused, Starboy 8 stumbles back on long, gazelle-like legs.

“Hey, Starboy, you are way out of your league here. This is serious fetish town and besides . . .” Tasinis's husky voice booms through the place. I look him up and down, my gaze stopping at his Ken-doll-blank, penis-less crotch. The avatar flicks her hair dismissively back over her shoulder. “. . . you seem to be missing some very basic accessories.”

“Yeah, fuck off, neuter! We have some Sodom and Gomorrah to get on with here!” One of the chained avatars is getting impatient. Starboy 8 gazes up at Tasinis.

“You're beautiful. There is no love here. I could rescue you.” I stare at the typed words emerging letter by letter. The guy hasn't even got an audio pack. This isn't a sex trade; it's some kind of romance whitewash. I can't believe the audacity, but also the ingenuousness—just where does this guy think he is?

“This is a sex dungeon, not Lovescape, and I'm a consenting adult. I don't need rescuing, buddy.”

“
If you don't need rescuing, why are you always in here losing yourself?”

Dragonman marches toward the new boy, who backs up against a nail-studded torture rack. Starboy 8's attitude has started to upset the natives. Tasinis drops her whip in surprise. Pushing past Dragonman, Starboy 8 picks it up and hands it back to her.

“Bye,” he types in before vanishing. Behind Tasinis the three chained avatars begin whimpering and wriggling their hips expectantly. For a moment I swear I hear Tasinis sigh before reaching down into her belt for her strap-on dildo.

 • • • 

That night I couldn't sleep. Maybe it was the heat; when you get to be as big as I was, you learn to dread the summer. Maybe it was just because it was my birthday and I was one year closer to forty, the year my daddy dropped dead because of his heart. And I was convinced I would be going the same way. I lay there hating myself, the silence of the whole housing complex folding around me as my sweat seeped into the sheets. I hadn't engaged emotionally in real time like that for a while, and it wasn't pleasant. But something had shifted in my universe, a small thing, a thing I couldn't name but could sense growing.

The next morning was a Saturday but I was going in to work anyhow, as I always worked the weekends for the extra cash—cash I would usually spend by Wednesday shopping in Second Life. I had my reputation to maintain. I mean, damn it, who would have guessed that Cassandra Whool was a cyber celebrity? But I was, or at least Tasinis was. And she
was
part of me, wasn't she?

I got up, showered, pulled on the old track pants and sweater I always wear on the weekends, then glanced in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door to check my hair was at least in a civilized condition. The mirror, full length, was taped up with cardboard so that I could see only my head and shoulders in the reflection. I'd taped on the cardboard years ago, just after Mom died. It made me feel better. It made me feel like my body below my neck did not belong to me but to someone else, someone who was a lot heavier than Cassandra from the neck down.

That morning my hair was looking kind of greasy and thin. I ran a comb through it, cussing. I've always thought grooming for a woman like me is a waste of time. Smoothing a tuft down, I grabbed my morning doughnut and rushed out to the car. While I was trying to get down the driveway as fast as my weight allowed me, a pain shot through my chest like a tight belt crushing my ribs. I stopped and rested, my hand on the garage wall. For a minute it eased off, and I climbed into the car. I kept thinking that if my time was up I wanted to go quickly like Pop and not slowly and painfully like Mom. She took months dying, and her insurance ran out. No one deserves to die like that, not even my mother.

In this part of the world your car becomes an extension of yourself, a metal cocoon to navigate the racing strips of time and noise that are the freeways. Everything else is an island attached to the end of these strips: the shopping mall, the call center, the gated community, and the nature reserve. I like driving because no one can see me. It's the only time in real life I feel empowered, like my body is my car, my real body invisible. The races were on at the Del Mar track that day and I was clever to miss the traffic, lines and lines of cars slowly moving bumper-to-bumper like a ribbon of silver snake sweltering in the sun.

I pulled up at the lights. I had Black Sabbath blaring out of the radio. In the lane next to me was a thin blonde in a Mercedes convertible, late thirties, with a chiseled look that smelt of money and good genes—two things I have always lacked in real life. I turned Classic Rock FM down. I couldn't help thinking how she had that glossed-over, airbrushed look of an avatar. All she was missing was the perfected skin, the impossibly enhanced breasts and lips, and massive babydoll fuck-me eyes. Was that how Tasinis would look in real life? Just then the thin blonde sensed me looking over and turned in my direction. Luckily the red light changed in that second and I sped away before she could really see me.

Back at the call center the parking lot was empty apart from a few cars. Weekend workers like me. It always spooked me to see it like this, I guess because it made me realize how friggin' big that place was. Like a desert, a concrete flatland with the concrete block that was the call center squatting barrenly against all that endless sky. Infinity. I would like to say it was timeless but it wasn't. It was definitely America, though, America at the end of a noose. “Is it any wonder,” I said out loud as I pushed through the heat already coming off the tarmac, “I git confused between this world and my second world? Is reality where you like to be or does it just fall over us like night?” My words scared a couple of crows picking at something dead on the sidewalk, and up they flew, cawing against the blue. Me, I was just glad to get out of all that blasting white light into the cool air-conditioning.

As I walked toward my desk a man hurried past me in the corridor—short like me but skinny, and with those handsome Latino features that Mom used to call Valentinoesque, after that twenties film star. There was something sad and nondescript about him, and I have to confess in my hurry to stay invisible I hardly noticed him. It was only after I got to my workstation that I realized he might be the night worker, my mirror parallel, Hector. Was he as invisible as me? Another shadow artist?

I put my headset on: “Yes, ma'am, that is correct. The Abdominal Toner is twenty-nine ninety-nine before shipping, which is an extra ten dollars . . . within the United States . . . Yes, ma'am . . .”

While answering the call I scanned the weekly updated list of products and their instructions. Suddenly I noticed the bottom left-hand corner of the page. Scribbled into the margin was a tiny pen drawing of a thigh-high winged boot.

The rest of the afternoon evaporated away like most of my working days do, in a haze of calls and coffee breaks. If you asked me, “Do you remember that day, Cassandra?” I would have to say, not really, except for one image, the picture that grew in my head. That drawing of the thigh-high boot with the little wing fixed to its ankle, because I swear, it wasn't me that drew the goddamn thing.

Later at home I'm sitting in front of the computer eating my usual Saturday night dinner, which is one In-N-Out king-size cheeseburger, Animal Style, with double fries and onion rings, a king-size Coke, and one slice of apple pie and vanilla ice cream and a chocolate chip cookie for afterward, all sitting in their cardboard tray—the burger oozing cheese, the apple pie oozing ice cream, the cookie sweating chocolate—perched on one side of my desk next to my credit cards laid out ready to use. And I'm sitting there, mayo running down my chin, mouse in one hand, burger in the other, and I'm inworld, on Second Life. And on-screen I am Tasinis, dressing for the kill, for my night feed of worship.

Tonight I have decided to exceed myself—I'm out to impress, I'm out to be queen, I'm out to be worshipped. Maybe it was that thin blonde and her smug air of entitlement, maybe it was because it was Saturday, but I am restless; I need a hit of major adoration. I have enhanced Tasinis's body—she now has a triple-D, forty-four-inch bust, two new silver nipple piercings, and another through her labia. I've also narrowed her waist by three inches, which felt real good, felt like I was giving the finger to that blonde in the Mercedes. Then we visited the hairdresser's at Cybermop Salon, Voyager Road, Freedom Island. I instructed Claude, Tasinis's favorite hairdresser, to design her a sixties beehive with a twenty-first-century wildness. I've dressed her in a Gucci leather-paneled corset with La Perla stockings and suspenders (both purchased from Haute Couture Paris, Second Life store). I then squeezed her into a skin-tight silver pencil skirt and matching stilettos—with six-inch heels. She looks great, kind of like the ultimate wild-child Barbie doll, and she is totally my creation. Three clicks of the mouse later and she's poised outside the orgy pit of Pleasure Dome 3, Venus, awaiting my instructions. I finish the cheeseburger, stuff a handful of fries into my mouth, and, trembling with anticipation, walk my baby in.