“No. But it gives me power over others. It’s an equation, isn’t it? I guess the less power you have in real life the more you seek it in Second Life,” Tasinis replies. It was the most personal she’d ever been.
I can’t believe what I’d just made Tasinis say. I’d never even thought about it that way before. Never. But somehow looking at Tasinis sitting there, her long legs folded under her a little awkwardly on that lush green grass, her metal visor now pushed over her head, her huge blue eyes sightless and blinking, makes a crack in me, in my avatar. Starboy 8 moves closer.
“Can I take your glove off?” he asks, and I swear it was the sexiest thing anyone had ever asked me on Second Life, something as innocent as that, after all the bondage, the orgies, the sex toys.
“Yes,” Tasinis whispers back before I’d even given her permission to speak. Starboy 8 takes her hand and peels off the glove. I feel a tingle in my special edition clit, or at least Tasinis felt it; me—I’m wriggling in my desk chair.
“I’m from California too,” Starboy 8 murmurs as he caresses Tasinis’s long fingers. Involuntarily my heart leaps in my chest. A tight feeling, but exhilarating, the feeling that something’s changing, something I have no control over, no choice.
“In Second Life we have no places, past, or history. We’re born new.”
“No one is born new. Listen, there’s a sex addicts clinic on Health Avenue. Avatars meet, talk, admit their addiction.”
“Is that what you think, you think I’m a sex addict?”
“I think you need to empower yourself on the outside, in real life.”
It suddenly feels hot inside my bedroom. My bedroom in real life. A mosquito bites my arm and I kill it with a slap: a red streak of blood. My blood. I look back at the screen. Starboy 8 is poised, waiting for a reply. I make Tasinis crack her whip and catch the leg of a passing parrot. Casually she dashes it against the trunk of a palm tree. In a flurry of scarlet and purple feathers it falls to the ground.
“Why do you care?” she says.
“Because I think you’re like me. I may be missing a dick, nipples, and other enhancements, but for all the sexy bits of your skin and the sex that you have, you’re missing something far more important.”
Starboy 8 moves his face closer to Tasinis’s. It’s like I can almost smell him, and I know he will be fresh and young, spice and hope. The tingle in Tasinis’s groin becomes a flashing light as her labia light up. Under my old T-shirt I become aware of my own sex, the tight warmth of it between my legs, and I become wet.
“There’s something else. I want to get to know you—the real you. But I want you to want me for me, not my X3 dick or ass, not the special edition nipples or hermaphrodite option, but me. Imagine this was real life; imagine we were fallible.” And then he kisses her/me and in that instant I am there in Tasinis’s skin. The touch of his lips, his tongue penetrating me tentatively, gently, and the sensation of it sending a jolt through my body, an explosion that bursts from my clitoris and ripples out up my belly and down both my legs, making me shake in my chair; a great white wave of contractions throws me back, my mouth opening as I moan involuntarily. My very first orgasm in real life. Shocked, I stay sitting as wave after wave of pure sweetness ripples through me; my body feels like it’s made of white light. I feel beautiful.
• • •
I was woken by sunlight across my face. I rolled over to stare at the alarm clock. I’d overslept for the first time in twelve years. Without getting out of bed I picked up the phone and called work. I told my boss I’d be in late that afternoon. I didn’t even bother to listen to his reply.
After hanging up the phone I stepped out of bed and stood in the middle of the room. The place looked different, brighter somehow: the colors of the walls, the way the sunlight was falling over my dressing table, picking out all the glinting silvers of my hairpins and Mom’s old jewelry. Even the faded colors of my old robe looked brighter. I wrapped the dressing gown around my body, the brushed cotton incredibly soft against my skin. Everything was more vivid, each sensation heightened. It was like I’d woken up in a different world, one flooded with light and color.
I ventured into the bathroom. The sunlight streaming in from the skylight filled it, transforming it into a prism of blues and greens. I showered, the hot water spraying thin needles of pleasure across my back. I climbed out, dried myself, then stood naked in front of the full-length mirror with the bottom half still covered by the sheet of cardboard. I worried my fingers around one corner, closed my eyes and tore it away, then counted to ten.
I opened my eyes and stared at my full reflection for the first time in three years. The white full curves of my body rippled down my sides, my breasts, large and pendulous, hung almost to my waist, my thighs were covered in stretch marks, and my belly almost obscured my pubis. But you know what? It was all me. I was finally looking at me.
I skipped breakfast and drove to the local shopping mall. At the huge Walmart store I bought a new red T-shirt and a long cotton skirt covered in small embroidered flowers. I hadn’t worn a skirt in years. Back at home I put on the skirt and T-shirt. It was like the colors were floating off the fabric and coloring my mood. Butterflies of dancing light. I didn’t want to question or doubt; I didn’t want to frighten this new Cass away.
I retrieved four large cardboard boxes from the garage and carried them up to Mom’s bedroom. It took me three hours to empty her closets and drawers and pack those boxes, but when I was finished I swear I felt a hundred pounds lighter.
That afternoon I drove to work with my car top open. The wind ruffled my hair and blew against my sunglasses. I had Classic Rock FM on and they were playing Steely Dan. I sang along at the top of my lungs. Driving beside the seafront through Del Mar, I thought I saw the water spout of a whale.
I got to the call center around three in the afternoon. Walking through the parking lot, I noticed how red the bougainvillea was that was planted against one wall of the building. I’d never even seen it there before. Once I was in the office, several of the other operators looked up from their desks. I could see the surprise in their eyes, like they saw I was different but couldn’t work out how. I got to my desk and sat down. Perched in the center of the desk, resting against an old pebble I once found as a child, was a postcard. A postcard with the words: “Welcome to Tahiti, island of joy” printed under a view of a green island in a blue sea. I turned it around. It was addressed to Tasinis, Second Life, and in the message space, someone had scrawled the word Hello.
I stared at it for a moment, then carefully slipped it into my drawer. And I knew then that I wouldn’t be logging on that night. I was going to wait to meet Hector the night worker, my shadow-self. I figured we might have a lot to say to each other.
WEATHER
It was one night after work before Alan came home that Phoebe first saw him. After an item about a two-headed kitten surviving in Basingstoke, an earthquake in Midwest America, and yet more trouble in the Middle East, the BBC news had cut to that inevitable mollifier of the English middle class—the weather report. Nestling into the old leather armchair, cup of hot tea held be
tween her knees, Phoebe found herself staring into the large, slightly bewildered brown eyes of Rupert Thornton, the new weatherman.
“Hello, he’s nice,” she thought to herself, allowing her eyes to wander over the tall, angular frame of the man. He looked to be somewhere in his midthirties, his thin wrists protruding from his shirtsleeves with a certain poignant vulnerability, the longish blond hair receding slightly from the domed forehead, the strong nose and cheekbones and large heavy-lidded eyes all united in a pleasing handsomeness—an old-world elegance. He looked, she thought, as if he’d just been dropped in from the nineteenth century and not 1987, a year she’d already decided was rather horrible, even if it was only July. Not wanting to dwell on her grievances, Phoebe glanced back up at the TV screen to concentrate.
Rupert Thornton stood in front of the map of the British Isles, arms raised as if he was about to conduct an orchestra: “Tomorrow is looking a little more optimistic with a warm front sweeping in. . . .” and here he lifted both hands and, in a curiously erotic gesture, circled the air as if he himself were pushing the warm front from Ireland toward Devon.
Phoebe sat up in her chair. The weatherman’s hands were well shaped with thick fingers, she noted, and before she could help herself she began wondering about the size of his penis, which was testimony to the lack of sex in her marriage, she observed ruefully. For the tenth time that day the image of her husband, Alan, flashed into her mind, the mottled, rugged landscape his naked back presented every night as he turned to switch the bedside lamp off—his way of signaling that any possible intimacy was now off the menu. It had been like that for months, maybe even a year, Phoebe calculated, trying to remember the last time they had made love. Christmas 1986 came to mind, but even then she wasn’t sure she’d had an orgasm. It was a depressing scenario especially, Phoebe reminded herself, as she was only twenty-six and considered attractive. Plenty of men would want her even if her husband didn’t.