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The next morning I woke up feeling a little different, like there was a thread of excitement weaving away inside me. Like something had started to unravel. For a minute I lay there wondering if there hadn’t been an earthquake in the middle of the night that I had only been unconsciously aware of, and some part of me was still on red alert.
I climbed out of bed and shuffled to the bathroom. After showering I pulled open a drawer that still held all my mother’s makeup. I couldn’t remember the last time I wore makeup—I’m guessing years. My hand hovered for a moment above all those shiny tubes and jars, all those magic tricks Mom used to keep her beautiful. Finally I selected a lipstick: coral pink. With the towel still wrapped around my body, I stood in front of the mirror. I took a big breath and carefully applied the lipstick, then loosened my damp hair and let it fall around my face. And you know what? I looked kind of okay.
• • •
For the first time in twelve years I found it difficult to concentrate at work. That day was hard, I’m telling you. Like, I’m sitting there and I can feel the air-conditioning blowing across my skin; I can hear the chatter of the other operators rising and falling like waves over the partitions, distracting me. Making me angry for no reason. I was not myself. Like, when I took my usual morning coffee break I picked up an apple and not a doughnut from the stand. I keep thinking about Starboy 8 and the date. How Tasinis had made no promises, how if I/we did meet him it was bound to get personal, and personal was what I’d been escaping all these years. And I started to think about Mom and how I was always such a disappointment to her, how I was never thin enough, never beautiful enough, and how she made me feel that afternoon screaming at me in the bathroom, calling me a sinner, and how I’d never been able to touch myself since. And all of the memories, those old fears and bad images, lifted up inside me like a tornado, only I was the tornado and the outside world was spinning around me and I thought I was going to throw up. So I stayed frozen to my desk, taking deep breaths in, calming myself down before anyone noticed. Five minutes later I’d made up my mind.
Cass didn’t do personal; therefore neither did Tasinis. We were both terrified. I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t afford to let anyone in, in this life or the Second. I had good reason: a Pandora’s box of nightmares.
That evening I sent my baby in full leather gear straight to Gothic Dungeon Sex Island. It was like I needed to get violent, to get lost in the frenzy. I needed to shake off my real-life skin and get as impersonal as possible. At least I thought I did.
• • •
Gothic Dungeon Sex Island: 20.00 7/02/2009
As Tasinis strides into the circular arena, sawdust swishing around her eight-inch spiked heels, a steel-cage visor tugged down over her eyes, hair pulled back severely into a waist-length ponytail, she c
racks her whip.
“Okay, scum, time to feel the anger of my whip!” It isn’t my best dominatrix command but it works anyhow: immediately three male avatars in neck cuffs and leather hand bindings begin groveling at Tasinis’s feet.
“Line up, dogs!” Tasinis orders.
The three crawl into position. Naked on all fours, cocks, balls, feathers, and tails all hanging down.
“Yes. Yes. Harder. Harder,” one of them, a muscular redhead with tattoos who for some inexplicable reason has a black penis, screams.
“Ohh! I’m coming. You bitch goddess of the lash,” the avatar at the end, a shaved humanoid head with a small dog’s tail poking out from between his buttocks, moans, the tip of his modified cock flashing red. This is a sign that normally would have had her/me excited by now, but Tasinis feels nothing. I feel nothing. For the first time the room looks kind of tawdry. The ropes and metal harnessing hanging off the old stone walls appear fake, and I suddenly notice the way the simulation dissolves into obvious pixels at the edges. The jerky fashion in which the avatars wriggle their hips and legs, making them look like wooden puppets, and the way their genitals bob up and down, orifices mechanically opening and closing, is kind of weird. The usual rush of excitement I feel when Tasinis’s whip touches avatar skin is gone. Totally. I can’t lose myself in Second Life. For the first time I can’t lose Cassandra.
I look at the time displayed in the right-hand corner of my desktop: it’s already ten past eight. Starboy 8 will be waiting in Tahiti. Suddenly I’m terrified I’ve left it all too late. In seconds I pull Tasinis out of the dungeon and send her straight to Tahiti, a fantasy island set in the 1800s.
• • •
Tahiti, Fantasy Island: 20.15 7/02/2009
I find Starboy 8 dressed as a shipwrecked French sailor sitting among a group of native Polynesians watching a ceremony. I haven’t had time to re-dress Tasinis and she looks ridiculous standing in full leather gear at the edge of a jungle clearing surrounded by native women and men wearing grass skirts. Starboy 8 doesn’t seem to care; he looks across and immediately leaps up and leads her by the hand into the jungle. She/I walk through the trailing vines, the chattering monkeys, and the brightly colored parrots that suddenly burst out of the foliage and fly across our path. Finally the two avatars arrive at a waterfall with a grassy outcrop hanging over the rushing water beneath. Starboy 8 and Tasinis sit on the grass.
“I thought you weren’t coming,” Starboy 8 begins.
“I wasn’t, then I changed my mind.”
“Let me guess—you were in Gothic Sex Dungeon?”
“How did you know?”
“Your outfit kind of gives you away.”
A large crocodile’s head emerges from the pool and snaps harmlessly at Tasinis’s leather-clad feet. It doesn’t look right; somehow I’m not convinced Tahiti would have crocodiles living on it.
“Are you from California?” asks Starboy 8.
“Maybe.”
“Do you have many friends on the outside?”
“No. I don’t need them; I live here most of the time.”
“In the dungeons and sex islands? Is that what makes you alive?”
