Part 48 (1/2)

The second half of the process took a little longer. There were eight digital camcorders in the apartment, over ten thousand dollars' worth of high-spec j.a.panese ingenuity. Two in the living room; four in the bedroom; two in the bathroom. He initially only put new tapes in six, almost electing not to bother with the ones in the bathroom. Never in the seven times he'd had s.e.x with Anne had the action careered into that room. With some women it did, with others it didn't. With Anne it didn't. But sometimes it was worth watching for the expression on the women's faces as they had a pee afterwards, thinking they were in a backstage area and safe from view. Shame, smug glee, guilty and compromised tears: they all informed what had gone before. He put one tape in that room after all, in the camera which directly faced onto the lavatory. He could live without a two shot in here: her face was what really counted.

Each of the cameras was carefully hidden: in curtains, on bookshelves, in tidy piles of clothes. He'd experimented with pinhole cameras in the past, tiny devices not much bigger than the chip required to drive them and the miniature lens on top, but the quality just wasn't good enough, and they required stringing up to a recorder of some kind, which would be kind of a pain.

When he'd finished he went back into the living room. Ten minutes to go. He put a little music on, running it off a pre-chosen play list on the computer. He listened to all music this way now. Soon as he bought a CD, he used ripping software to store it on the hard disk as MP3files. Each file was a mere couple of megabytes in size, and with the array of 100-gig racks he had built into the desk, there was room for thousands of tracks at resolutions none of his guests were likely to be able to tell from the real thing. Truth be told, he probably couldn't these days either. It had been a while since he'd even bought a CD. Couldn't remember the last time, in fact. Now he just culled the MP3 files direct from the Web. Some were legit, some rip-offs. It didn't matter. That was the great thing about the Web-the distance it put between you and the scene of the crime. No one was going to come and find him. Not down those countless little wires. They were too thin for culpability to seep through. You could spend your entire life on the Web without exposing yourself to anything more dangerous than spam or mail-bombing, both of which he was more than capable of dealing with.

The only people he had direct contact with, the only ones who ever learned his physical address and entered his corporeal world, were the women he met in the Web's virtual chat rooms. He'd cultivate them carefully, coming on like some newbie lurker: matching their own shy advances and only very gently nudging the conversation into the slow spiral that would end in them taking the exchange out of a public arena and into private e-mail. He only ever fished on boards that were loosely tied to his own geographical location. There was no point spending all that time and effort only to find that she lived on the other side of the world.

Because eventually he would have convinced the woman-or, in her mind, they would have convinced each other-that it was time to take the relations.h.i.+p a little further. To take it backwards, out of these futuristic and nebulous lines of communication and back to the basic human levels that had worked since the dawn of time. It was never organized by phone. He had not once given his number out. Instead it would be a series of e-mails, a courts.h.i.+p of text: a careful progression for her, sentences fretted over, rewritten, revised or sometimes sent with a spastic click of a b.u.t.ton before she had time to change her mind-but often the same old same old for him, as he'd found that he could cut and paste chunks out of previous campaigns and use them time and again.

And eventually the first visit would happen. A woman, slightly overdressed, eyes round with courage, would turn up at his door. The obvious would happen, and he was good. So it would happen again, and again. At intervals: when the woman could s.n.a.t.c.h the time; when the ennui she felt in her real life was so acute that it could only be a.s.suaged by an action whose dishonesty jerked her out of her rut. Not all the women had been married, in fact probably not even the majority: but for the ones who weren't the very fact that they were prepared to enter into so one-track a relations.h.i.+p showed that none of them were worth taking seriously. It would carry on until something happened-a crisis of confidence, a tearful revelation to a husband, a prying boyfriend discovering an e-mail trail, which by now would be a lewd series of a.s.signation-making-and it was over. He was never the one to make the move. He let them do it, because that way he knew they wouldn't be coming back and bugging him. They'd just be gone. To be immediately replaced by another one, whom he would have been cultivating in the meantime, keeping out there in the ether until the time was right.

The doorbell rang. He walked across the room toward the door, checking his hair in the mirror as he pa.s.sed.

She was standing outside. Rather casually dressed, which annoyed him. He liked to see a bit of effort, not least because it proved that the affair was still at the hotter-than-hot stage. Thoughshe did at least look a little flushed.

”Hi, David,” she said, and he was pleased to notice a slight catch in her voice. ”You're looking good.”

Yes, he thought, I am. And later he found that what she was wearing underneath the blouse and pants wasn't casual at all.

Two and a half hours later he heard the door close behind her as she left the apartment. He'd been lying on the bed, faux dozing: he was prepared to do a lot of things to keep women convinced they were having one of the world's greatest affairs, but listening to them prattle after the event wasn't one of them. As soon as he was sure she'd gone, he was up and in the shower.

A good one, he thought, as he sluiced himself clean. And maybe the best-directed yet. He showered slowly, prolonging the moment.

When he was done, and comfortable in a fluffy white dressing gown that he liked because it never seemed to get dirty, he went through into the kitchen, fired up his other computer, and put a big pot of coffee on. He dropped the two winegla.s.ses-hers empty, his still half-full-in the trash. He had plenty more. Then he went back through the apartment and collected up the tapes.

One from each of the living room cameras, which were triggered as soon as the door was opened and the woman came in. The four from the bedroom: two of these he had switched on as soon as they'd entered this room, via an extra spur off the bedside lamp; the others were on a trip delay to start recording fifty minutes later, to cover for the fact that one hour was the maximum tape length for the format he used. You could get longer, on different machines, but the quality was nowhere near as good.

Then the final one, from the bathroom-which he triggered by another switch once the s.e.x was finished. It was this tape that he ripped to disk first, sitting at the desk with a steaming mug of very good coffee and a cigarette. It only took ten minutes to save it to an MPEG file, and then he set the others to rip in sequence in the background, porting the digital footage onto the array of hard disks, ready for a first quick edit. After a slow first viewing.

This is what he did it for now. This was the moment he enjoyed. Not at first: three years ago, after his last genuine relations.h.i.+p had broken up, he'd just been looking for fun and companions.h.i.+p like everyone else. Maybe even someone to fall in love with. This hadn't happened with the first one, or the one after that. A pattern emerged. He didn't mind. Before, when he'd been taken, he'd envied his friends still out there in the market, the ones with the slew of drunken collisions in clubs and bars, with the long list of accidental one-night conquests. New b.r.e.a.s.t.s hefted, new b.u.t.tocks splayed. David believed that men were collectors, taxono-mists, seekers after and catalogers of variety-and he wanted some of it.

After a while the variety began to pall, however, and he felt less and less a part of what was going on. The women who turned up at his door started to seem too similar to each other. They might have different color hair, contrasting figures, and taste individual where it counted, but in the wriggles and grapples across couches and down corridors and round and round the bed they all ended up blending into one-not least because they shared a fundamental similarity.

They weren't The One. He came to realize that it wasn't them who made him feel alive. What kept him going was himself, his own part in the proceedings. That, and the record.It started more or less by accident. As accidentally, that is, as one can leave a camcorder running in a room where one is likely to be nicking a woman in the very near future. He'd bought the camera for the h.e.l.l of it, mainly because a new computer had come with nonlinear video-editing software preinstalled. He ordered the camera over the Web, and it turned up at his door. Pretty soon he realized that he didn't have anything in his immediate environment worth recording, and no desire to be going out and shooting some shoddy masterpiece for Web distribution to net-heads with cable access and too much time on their hands. But then an idea struck him, one afternoon when a woman was coming round. Feeling suddenly excited, on the verge of something new, he found a place to wedge the camera in the bookcase, where it would capture whatever happened on the couch. What the h.e.l.l, he thought: might be kind of interesting. When the doorbell rang he turned the camera on, carefully positioning books and a small ornamental box (a present from a past f.u.c.k) to hide the red light that indicated it was recording. The s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g moved into the bedroom after forty minutes, but when he watched the tape later that night it was still enough to make him lob his c.o.c.k right out and achieve his third o.r.g.a.s.m of the day: hunched over the desk, eyes wide and glued to the startling images on the screen. Afterwards, spent though he was, he watched the tape again and again, wiping it back and forward, reviewing the captured moments-acknowledging, as if for the first time, that the event really had happened. He really had screwed that woman: she had done this to him; he had done that to her. There it was. It was all recorded. He could see it. He could see it twice.

He could see it whenever he wanted.

And she'd never know. It had pa.s.sed out of the domain of her life, and into his alone. All she would have was vague memories, different occasions blending into one: he could have every event pinned to a board like a b.u.t.terfly.

After that, he recorded the first hour as a matter of course, fixing a piece of tape over the red light to give more flexibility. It wasn't long before he wanted more. At first it was just a camera in both rooms. Then one in the bathroom, because a woman called Monica had got some obscure thrill from doing it in there. Then the extra one in the bedroom, and the second in the living room, because by that time he'd realized how much better it would be if he could get the raw material from two angles: partly just because you couldn't always position the woman to best effect without danger of it being obvious; mainly because it just seemed more real. The two-shot setup made all the difference. The cuts from angle to angle, from view to different view, showed just how true it was, filled it out into three dimensions. It was like a real movie.

It was realer than real life.

Finally the extra pair in the bedroom, to make sure not a moment was lost.

He loved doing his films. He f.u.c.king loved it. It was partly to punish them for boring him. It was mainly because the films showed how much stronger his reality was than theirs, because whatever thoughts were fizzing around their desperate heads during the time they spent in his home, they had no idea what was really going on. That he was recording them, and later could edit the different shots together into any shape he liked. Picking the shots to show himself in control, to show them naked and exposed, leaving the soundtrack real to capture their gasps and squelches, their moans and pathetic avowals of love, of desire, of whatever it was they felt they had to say to make this seem okay to do. He had tapes of every session with every girl, all tidily filed in nested folders on his hard drives. He had ”greatest hits” edits, too, each woman'sbest or most revealing moments. He had compilations, quick cuts of the same type of activity performed with a score of different women. He watched the digital films whenever he wanted, his breathing shallow but measured, face bathed in the monitor light, staring at himself, at his power. While the women were with him they had a kind of fake reality, shoved at him through their physical presence. When they were gone their true nature was revealed: as extras in his life, as vague presences at the end of an e-mail. He spent whole evenings reediting for the fun of it, and after a while his vision became more detailed, more refined. He culled through the bathroom tapes, catching the private moments and interspersing them with the other material: Marie looking smug afterwards, thinking she'd shown him the time of his life-when the next cut was that of David exaggeratedly yawning to camera while she enthusiastically sucked him half an hour before; Janine breathlessly declaring their s.e.x as some kind of spiritual triumph, c.r.a.pping on about how much she loved him-then later, sitting slumped on the can, sobbing in silent, racking waves and softly sc.r.a.ping the nails of both hands down her tear-tracked face.

Each time he made a tape he felt more himself, more vital. Sometimes he would start a film running on the computer and then switch the monitor off just before the current woman arrived.

Though it could be neither seen nor heard, it was still playing, still being conjured up out of ones and zeros into image: footage of him plowing one woman while in real and current time he squeezed the t.i.t of another; or of the same woman as she would be in the bathroom afterwards, the event contextu-alized before it had even finished.

The tapes had nearly done being digitized. It was time for another pot of coffee. David leaned against the counter as the water boiled, listening to the chirrup of the hard drive as the files of the raw material were written. He was noticing that he felt tired. Vestiges of the hangover, presumably, and Anne was a workout by anybody's standards. She'd seemed even more frenetic than usual that afternoon, as if testing him, or herself. Or maybe it was just too much coffee on an empty stomach, making him feel a little dizzy. Didn't matter. He was having more Java anyway. It was traditional.

He took the new pot and a jug of cream over to the desk, so he wouldn't have to get up for a while. Then when the machine pinged to signify all the hard work was done, he reached out and clicked the first file. He always waited until they were all done. He liked it that way. Once he'd started watching, he needed to know he could jump to any part he wanted, immediately. It was part of the fun.

The bathroom tape started with ten minutes of nothing-Anne had lain beside him on the bed for a while after they'd finished. David sat and admired the fact that he'd remembered to refold the towels, to make them look just so. The women got good value out of him: the films were just a payment they didn't know they were making. Then there was the sound of the door being opened, and Anne's back swished into view with the sound of the door closing again. She stood in front of the mirror and ran the cold tap, nothing readable in the expression reflected back over her shoulder. She splashed some water over her face, and then sat down on the john. It was then, with her face much more directly visible by the camera, that David realized her facial expression wasn't actually unreadable after all. He watched for the few minutes she sat there, before flus.h.i.+ng and leaving the room. Then he clicked back to an earlier frame in the MPEG. And watched it again.

It wasn't his imagination. He was sure of it. He'd seen ”unreadable” before. Some womenwere like that. When not on stage, and making an effort to perform, the most vivacious of them could turn remarkably waxlike, as if they were nothing without an audience. This wasn't like that. There was something in her face. It was just something he'd ever seen before.

It was . . . what? Quietness? No. Dissatisfaction? Still no, but. . .

David frowned suddenly and put his cup down on the desk. He clicked the tape back again.

His face felt a little hot.

She actually just looked a little bored.

He irritably lit a cigarette. That couldn't be right. Not after what they'd done. Not after the free-wheeling exhibition of technique he'd put on from the couch all the way through to their mutual and grunting climaxes. Perhaps she'd just had something else on her mind. Presumably things went on in her life. He never asked, but usually they'd say, filling him in regardless-wrongly a.s.suming he'd care. Whatever. She hadn't been bored. It wasn't possible.

David shut the window on that tape and set another loading, wiping the back of one hand across his forehead as he waited. He still felt kind of hot. Embarra.s.sment, maybe. At his initial thought that she might have regarded their coupling as less than earth-moving. Indignation was more appropriate. If she was frigid enough not to be jolted out of whatever little psychodrama from her outside life had been swirling around her head, then she was f.u.c.king on borrowed time. With him, anyway. Doubtless hubby would still limply put out, still engage her in the mildewy fumblings she'd come to David to escape. a.s.suming Anne had a husband. Right now he was so irritated he couldn't even remember.

The tape from the living room was better. A lot better. The fifteen minutes of chitchat and sipping, a spiral like the closing stages of the e-mail courts.h.i.+p-but one with a known destination. Then a frank movement from him: reaching out to stroke a breast through her blouse, then slipping his hand right up her skirt out of nowhere. He loved doing that. Making moves that a.s.sumed. Being in a position to demonstrate that this wasn't any coy long shot, but a f.u.c.king cert. It looked great on the video, too. Made the woman look just like what she was: a three-dimensional version of the pictures you could pick up on a zillion sites all over the Web.

Just something within his field of vision. Something for him to play with. And they loved it.

They really did. Loved being treated that way.

Soon they were both half-dressed. He turned her immaculately, cupping her b.r.e.a.s.t.s from behind, nuzzling her neck as she arched her head back, eyes closed-while he stared straight into the camera. There was a brief glitch in the digitizing and his hands frizzed for a moment, but otherwise it was a cla.s.sic scene-with some superb cutaways possible to the other camera's point of view. Cla.s.sic for the soft-core portion, anyhow: there would be meaner, better stuff later.

Then more of that, more of the usual. Building up. A b.u.t.ton here, a strap there. Then a zipper. David could now judge how much time he had in the living room, how to steer things toward the corridor before there was any danger of the tapes running out. With three minutes to go, both still standing but with pants around their ankles, he touched her in a way that had her backing giggling out of the room, pulling him by something a man is bound to follow.

Just as they pa.s.sed out of sight of the cameras, David noticed another little visual weirdness. He stopped the film, clicked back. Right at the end there was a two-second patch where there was a little streaming around the image of his head, tiny pixelated blocks of color.He flicked up the other camera's view of the same moment, and was relieved to see it looked fine. He'd just have to cut at that point. Something wrong with the tape, probably.

Condensation. Or the recording head needed cleaning. He sorted through the cameras, found the offending tape, and put it to one side to check out later.

Then he kicked up the first of the bedroom films. He'd missed a little bit of action in the meantime, he knew. In the corridor Anne had bent to take him in her mouth for a couple of minutes. Not for the first time he mused it would be good to have a camera in there, too.

Problem was, how to conceal it. Maybe he'd have to compromise, get a pinhole and hide it in a picture. Might even look good: a kind of voyeur, security camera-style section. Hmm. Think about that later: the bedroom tape showed events liquidly transforming into full flow.

He'd known at the time it was good. Not the s.e.x, so much, as the way he'd controlled its movements, its ebb and flow. Her head there, in direct shot. His hand here, just where it could be seen. Seemingly spontaneous little rolls, taking the action from one view to another. Her moans and sighs, his encouraging grunts. Thrusts, acceptances, retractions and changes of position, all maximized for his eyes. Prime stuff, packaged and presented. A cla.s.sic.

Except-s.h.i.+t.

He clicked back thirty seconds, not really knowing what he'd spotted. Watched the section again.

Straightforward shot, with them sideways across the bed, taken by the camera hidden up on the curtain rail. Him on top of her in missionary position, holding her shoulders down and grinding away. Her hands on his a.s.s, pulling him in and out. Her hair spread over the sheets like a mermaid's floating in shallow water. Her legs raised up after a moment, clasping behind his. So much for the ”boredom,” he thought, with joyful spite-she was loving it. She moved her hands up along his back, nails out for a little playful scratching, and then slipped them both up and round to cup his face. Her eyes opened for a moment, looking up into his, searching for something. Maybe she found it. Maybe not.

Freeze. Click back two seconds. There. Her hands cupping his face.

He could see them.