Cassandra’s face is crushing against the floor, her body nearly prostrate save her stiff limbs, slightly bent at the joints, miraculously balancing her entire weight on just her right knee and left elbow. Her ass is in the air, bare and cold to the touch. She’s not wearing any underwear. Reaching behind him, He fishes out a red bikini bottom from a cardboard box and slowly, carefully, slides it up her legs until the elastic fits snugly around her sharp hips.
He picks her up, hands tugging at her slender waist, until she is back on her two feet. Cassandra stands tall; her bare breasts defiant to both his gaze and to gravity.
“What do you think, Gina?” He asks, turning his head. Behind him is an older woman, dressed in a sophisticated suit, a set of knuckles pressed against her left hip. As usual, her neutrality convinces him.
“I don’t like it either. But that’s how they want her.”
He leaves Cassandra topless and walks off to the bathroom. He feels around his pockets for a cigarette but find a warm stick of gum instead. He think “Seal” is playing on the speakers.
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As you pass the Lafayette BART Station on Highway 24, you see a hill behind it that’s covered with graves. A cemetery made mostly of bone-white wooden crosses. Someone else would say, “Why on Earth would anyone be buried here?” To that you would respond, “So that their souls can ride BART into San Francisco city, and if they choose, to the airport so they can go anywhere in the world they want to.”
You would be 10 years old.
If the Trojans buried their dead with a coin placed over each eye so that they could pay the boatman fare to cross the river Styx for their inevitable afterlife, I guess the people buried on that hill in Lafayette would need to have transit cards tucked in their breast pockets, one way.
But it’s a mock memorial for US troops that have died in Iraq.
“No one’s going anywhere today because it’s Christmas in a few hours and I have to get you home so that you can open the present I got for you. It’s Call of Duty 4, the first one. You get to be a British Special Ops agent who fights in Russia and a US Marine that invades the Middle East. I know you wanted the second one, but it was sold out.”
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“Nick Manning is like, a porn star or something,” she explains. “He’s got this soundboard that’s online with all his catch phrases. It’s really gross because they’re taken from the pornos he’s in and you can hear girls moaning in the background or something.
“You should totally check it out.”
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After a few beers, we walk outside. It’s a late cold night with still air and any sound I hear sobers me up a little. My friend is cold; her arms are folded over her chest when I offer her my jacket. I wonder if she’s really cold because she doesn’t zip up the jacket – she just lets it drape over her shoulders. Suddenly, I’m thinking about cloaks and mantles as a possible modern fashion trend and then about vampires because that’s the kind of thing they would wear because I had just re-read “Interview with the Vampire” and proper vampires dress like Louis and Lestat and proper vampires would sleep in a coffin at night and fear the sun and not sparkle like diamonds like the “vampires” do in “Twilight”.
And then we walk around a corner and nearly step into a shopping cart. It’s full of the usual hobo junk but the proprietor of the cart is standing there alone, flossing his teeth.
I almost stop completely to gawk at this but my friend tugs at my arm and I am forced to rubberneck as I walk her back to her car.
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