Peter Spiegelman - Red Cat

“Bring the popcorn and soda?” he said, smiling. He took my elbow and led me toward Henry Street and he talked the whole way to Todd Herring’s house.

“Todd’s a major music-biz lawyer,” Monroe said. “He bought this place two years ago- the same time he traded in his wife for a newer version- and he’s been renovating ever since. About the only thing he’s managed to finish is the home theater, which is lucky for us. He’ll be showing us Interview Two and Interview Four tonight.”

Herring’s place was a wide four-story brownstone, with a construction Dumpster parked outside and scaffolds climbing up the front. There were broad steps from the sidewalk to a pair of tall, deep-set black doors. Monroe leaned on the doorbell and smiled into the video intercom.

A lanky, red-haired man in jeans and a FUBU T-shirt ushered us into a high-ceilinged entrance hall that was decorated in dropcloths and plaster dust.

“Chaz, my brother,” the man said. He had a deep, radio voice, and he wrapped Monroe in a stiff-armed, stylized hug, and pounded him lightly on the back with a fist. Monroe endured it with amusement.

“Todd, my man,” he said, and kept nearly all the laughter from his voice. “This is John March.”

“Good to meet you, bro,” Todd said, and held a fist out to me. I tapped it lightly with my own.

Todd Herring was tall, skinny, and abundantly freckled. His carroty hair was expensively cut but salted with white, and despite the business with the fists and the “bro” talk I figured him for fifty.

“We’ll go downstairs,” he said, and he led us past a curving stairway and many paint cans to other, narrower stairs going down.

The brownstone’s garden floor was thickly carpeted, heavily paneled, and flush with recessed halogen lighting. We followed Todd down another hall, past a well-equipped kitchenette.

“Drinks for anybody?” he asked. I declined, but Monroe hit him up for a beer. Todd fetched a Carta Blanca and a frosted mug and led us to the theater. He flicked a switch and muted lights came up on the walls and from the ceiling. There were twenty thick, theater-style seats, arranged in four curving rows before a large screen. Todd went to a black cabinet at the back of the room and fiddled with some technology inside.

“Sit anywhere,” he said. He flicked a switch, and a large flat monitor swiveled quietly out of the ceiling at the front of the room.

Chaz took a seat in the second row center and put his beer bottle and glass into the slots built into the armrest. I wandered to the front of the room, and looked at a pair of glass-fronted wooden boxes leaning against the wall. They were the same size, about twelve inches by fifteen inches by four inches deep. One was made from cherry wood and one was bird’s-eye maple, and there were shelves and cubbyholes built inside of them, and little objects mounted there. They reminded me of Joseph Cornell boxes and I walked closer and knelt for a better view. A chill went through me.

“She calls them reliquaries, bro,” Todd said. “She makes them by hand, and there’s one for each of her videos, but I’d wait until afterward to look at them. They make more sense, and the impact is…bigger.”

I looked at Chaz and he nodded. “It’s a context issue,” he said, and he swallowed some beer.

I nodded back and took a seat behind Chaz. Todd hit the lights and the room went black and I wondered what context would make sense of what I’d seen behind the glass.

“You don’t want a real drink?” Chaz Monroe asked me. “Because you look like you could use one.”

“Ginger ale is fine,” I said. Monroe shrugged and wedged into the pack at the bar to order. In fact, he had a point. I felt wobbly and somehow disoriented, and the walk from Todd Herring’s house to Smith Street had made no dent in that. “Like nothing else I’ve seen,” Ricky had said. Ricky hadn’t lied.

I found an empty table in a corner of the crowded room and slid along the green banquette. Monroe wasn’t long in coming and he handed me my drink and took the seat opposite. He tilted his glass to mine.

“To art, bro,” he said ironically. He swallowed some scotch and gave me a speculative look. “So, what did you think?”

I shook my head. “Are they all like that?”

“The particulars are different, but the narrative arc is the sameall the ones I’ve seen, anyway: the e-mail, the first meeting, the dominance and submission, the investigation, and the final interrogation.”

“Do you ever see the men’s faces?”

Monroe shook his head. “They’re always digitally masked, the faces and anything else that might identify them- scars, tattoos, that kind of thing. And their voices are distorted. It depersonalizes themdestroys their individuality and turns them into objects, into nothing more than their desires and demands. At least, until you start feeling sorry for the poor fucks.”

“But you always see Cassandra?”

“All there is to see- and you always hear her voice too. Nothing masked there.”

Not much, I thought, and shook my head. “Jesus,” I said.

“Indeed,” Monroe said, and he drank off the rest of his scotch. “Too quick,” he sighed. “Another soda for you, or maybe something stronger?” I declined and he headed for the bar. I looked into my glass and thought again about the videos. It wasn’t easy to do, but it was impossible to stop.

They were each about fifty minutes long, and they both began with hand-held, documentary-style camera work- close-up, fidgety images of printed e-mail. The To and From fields, and any other information that could have identified sender or receiver, were redacted with thick black lines, and the messages themselves were brief- guarded, two- or three-line responses to an on-line personal ad. A woman’s voice read the text as the camera panned across the pages. Flat and emotionless as it was, I recognized it from David’s cell phone. Wren.

The first video, Interview Two, cut from the e-mail to hidden camera footage taken at tabletop level in a blurry bar or cafГ©. There was a man at the table with Cassandra, and I came to think of him as Skinny. His face was a mass of flesh-toned pixels, and his speech was synthesized and mechanical. But for the expensive tailoring, he could’ve been a government informant or the emcee on some hostage video.

“Late afternoon works for me- five-thirty or six… I’m not into drugs, and if you are, we can stop right here… I like to talk while we…you know.”

The robot voice seemed at first too deep for Skinny’s narrow frame, and too detached for the awkward situation. But after a while, it was the human bits that remained in his speech- the coughs and sighs and breathing, the pauses and small stutters- that seemed out of place.

For her part, Cassandra was demure throughout. She nodded agreement to nearly everything Skinny said, and when she spoke, her words 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.