were few and just above a whisper.
“I have a room a few blocks from here. Would you like to go now?”
And then came the sex.
It began without segue, in a dim hotel room with yellow light spilling from an open bathroom door and bleeding through a tiny gap in the drapes. The images were fuzzy and the visual style was amateur Internet porn: greenish, ghostly figures, the weightless movements of moonwalkers, and nothing left to the imagination. Eventually, I realized that the scene was actually several scenes, a montage of many late afternoons, and I realized there was a progression to the sex: from the more to the less conventional. From the variety of the angles, I guessed Cassandra must have had three cameras hidden around the room, and with them she captured a full catalogue of trajectories and thrusts. Through it all Skinny called the shots, tentatively at first, and then without reservation.
“You like that, don’t you…” “You want it there…” “Tell me you want it there…” “Say it like you mean it…” “Say it again, bitch.”
The soundtrack was dominated by his synthesized commands and exhortations, and by his unadulterated panting, grunts, and huffing. The unprocessed sounds were startling in their intimacy, and more unsettling than his words.
Beneath Skinny’s dictates and the other noises he made, Cassandra’s voice was a leitmotif of gasping obedience. She did what Skinny told her to do and said what he told her to say, and when he told her to say it again, she did. She moaned and cried out and pleaded, sometimes in pleasure and sometimes not, and her white, limber body bent and twisted beneath Skinny’s cubist face. Her own icon’s face, when it was visible, was pale and empty-eyed.
What Monroe had called the investigation segment began with what seemed a pause in the sex montage, and with a gradual change in the sound and look of the video. The commands and moaning faded away, and the noise of a running shower grew louder. Colors bled from the screen and were replaced by a smoky black and white. The tang of seedy sex dissipated and a sweaty paranoia took its place.
The bathroom door was opened wide and Cassandra was alone on the wrecked bed. Her naked body was luminous but her movements were stiff and achy as she rose and moved to a chair, to a jacket hanging there, to a pocket and a wallet inside. She looked over her shoulder as she rifled through the wallet and withdrew some cards. She held them to the camera lens, and though their surfaces were masked it was plain that they were credit cards and business cards. I’d thought of David when I saw it. My wallet was in my suit jacket…
I’d thought of him again as the scene shifted to another blurry interior and a shot of Cassandra, dressed now and hunched above a telephone. Skinny’s wind-up voice was distant on the other end, but the fear and anger in his words were close at hand and unmistakable.
“Don’t call here, for chrissakes…” “How did you get this number, you crazy bitch…” “Why are you calling me…” “What do you want from me…” “Fucking bitch— I’ll kill you, you call again…” “Just leave me alone…” “Please…just leave me alone.”
But she wouldn’t. I’d heard Cassandra’s side of the conversation before, on David’s voicemail. Her words were different in the video but she covered the same scary ground, and she was relentless.
“Why don’t you write me anymore? Why don’t you call? You think you can just ignore me? If you won’t take my calls, maybe your wife will.”
Their back-and-forth was a tortured accompaniment to more images of Cassandra on the telephone, and to shots of a blur-faced Skinny walking the streets, hailing taxis, entering and leaving unidentifiable buildings, and completely unaware of the camera trailing him. In the course of maybe ten minutes of video, his initial surprise gave way to anger, his anger mutated to fear, and his fear
“I have a room a few blocks from here. Would you like to go now?”
And then came the sex.
It began without segue, in a dim hotel room with yellow light spilling from an open bathroom door and bleeding through a tiny gap in the drapes. The images were fuzzy and the visual style was amateur Internet porn: greenish, ghostly figures, the weightless movements of moonwalkers, and nothing left to the imagination. Eventually, I realized that the scene was actually several scenes, a montage of many late afternoons, and I realized there was a progression to the sex: from the more to the less conventional. From the variety of the angles, I guessed Cassandra must have had three cameras hidden around the room, and with them she captured a full catalogue of trajectories and thrusts. Through it all Skinny called the shots, tentatively at first, and then without reservation.
“You like that, don’t you…” “You want it there…” “Tell me you want it there…” “Say it like you mean it…” “Say it again, bitch.”
The soundtrack was dominated by his synthesized commands and exhortations, and by his unadulterated panting, grunts, and huffing. The unprocessed sounds were startling in their intimacy, and more unsettling than his words.
Beneath Skinny’s dictates and the other noises he made, Cassandra’s voice was a leitmotif of gasping obedience. She did what Skinny told her to do and said what he told her to say, and when he told her to say it again, she did. She moaned and cried out and pleaded, sometimes in pleasure and sometimes not, and her white, limber body bent and twisted beneath Skinny’s cubist face. Her own icon’s face, when it was visible, was pale and empty-eyed.
What Monroe had called the investigation segment began with what seemed a pause in the sex montage, and with a gradual change in the sound and look of the video. The commands and moaning faded away, and the noise of a running shower grew louder. Colors bled from the screen and were replaced by a smoky black and white. The tang of seedy sex dissipated and a sweaty paranoia took its place.
The bathroom door was opened wide and Cassandra was alone on the wrecked bed. Her naked body was luminous but her movements were stiff and achy as she rose and moved to a chair, to a jacket hanging there, to a pocket and a wallet inside. She looked over her shoulder as she rifled through the wallet and withdrew some cards. She held them to the camera lens, and though their surfaces were masked it was plain that they were credit cards and business cards. I’d thought of David when I saw it. My wallet was in my suit jacket…
I’d thought of him again as the scene shifted to another blurry interior and a shot of Cassandra, dressed now and hunched above a telephone. Skinny’s wind-up voice was distant on the other end, but the fear and anger in his words were close at hand and unmistakable.
“Don’t call here, for chrissakes…” “How did you get this number, you crazy bitch…” “Why are you calling me…” “What do you want from me…” “Fucking bitch— I’ll kill you, you call again…” “Just leave me alone…” “Please…just leave me alone.”
But she wouldn’t. I’d heard Cassandra’s side of the conversation before, on David’s voicemail. Her words were different in the video but she covered the same scary ground, and she was relentless.
“Why don’t you write me anymore? Why don’t you call? You think you can just ignore me? If you won’t take my calls, maybe your wife will.”
Their back-and-forth was a tortured accompaniment to more images of Cassandra on the telephone, and to shots of a blur-faced Skinny walking the streets, hailing taxis, entering and leaving unidentifiable buildings, and completely unaware of the camera trailing him. In the course of maybe ten minutes of video, his initial surprise gave way to anger, his anger mutated to fear, and his fear
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