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hi from cassandra

It was there on the lit screen of his computer, his Inbox containing a single message. It said ‘hi from cassandra,’ all in lower case letters, ‘hi from cassandra’ as though she was a friend he had lost touch with. He didn’t know anyone called Cassandra, or Cassie or Cass.

The silence of the house at his back hurt his ears as he strained to hear above the hum of the computer the inward swing of the gate outside, or her returning footsteps on the path, the rattle of her key in the lock. He would meet her half way, he thought, in the hall, his hand raised to the latch on the door, on his way out to find her. But there was no key in the lock, no footstep on the path, no swing to the gate.

He clicked on the message.

It was dated Thu, 19 May 2006 04:09:46 –0800.

It was from “cassandra” <zrtnd@sarrio.every1.net>

Hi, said cassandra, i am here sitting in the internet caffe. Found your email and decided to write. I am 25 y.o. girl. I have a picture if you want. No need to reply here as this is not my email. Write me at acassandra8@byemailonline.info.

It caught him by surprise, caught him off guard, not just because he didn’t know anyone called cassandra, but because he suspected that there was something not quite clean about this communication. He felt guilty having opened it. His instinct was to delete it, before it was too late, before it infected his computer and corrupted all his files; but, unaccountably, he left it on his screen and went to check the front door.

In his head he heard again the earlier slam of the door and, so close that they couldn’t be separated, its attendant echo. Like the timpani of thunder, he had thought, or the reverberating thump of a heavy sea on the hollow hull of a boat. The windows in the house had trembled, the glass loose in their wooden frames. Then everything was still again, as though the world held its breath, anticipating the next wave-slap, the drum roll of rain.

They’d argued. He couldn’t remember about what, a ‘domestic’ of some sort. They were always arguing now. Something had changed between them, and it had changed everything. He felt it when he walked into a room and she was there. The air was different, tasted of metal or blood on his tongue; or the light was altered, like the dull silver-grey light that is in the sky just before a grey storm breaks.

The front door was shut, the hall empty. He returned to the computer.

He reread the message. Hi, said cassandra again. He thought of Cassandra from Greek mythology, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, another Helen with beauty that tempted the god Apollo. i am here sitting in the internet caffe. He tried to picture cassandra, sitting at a screen, just as he was sitting at his, searching for a connection somewhere, reaching out towards him. He wondered if the lower case i was deliberate, if it said something he was supposed to notice. And the misspelling of caffe caught his attention too, like something written in old English. In the Greek stories Cassandra was so loved and desired by Apollo that he granted her the gift of prophecy; in another story she spent a night in Apollo’s temple and the temple snakes licked her ears clean so that she was then able to hear the future.

He closed his eyes, ran his fingers through his hair and tried to hear again what he had said, what she had said, but everything leaked through his grasp, like trying to snatch water from a mountain fall. He thought of the story of the little dutch boy who saved an entire town or country by sticking his finger or thumb in a hole in a dyke. Only there were more holes in their relationship, more holes than he had fingers to stop them up with. He thought of Little Jack Horner sat in his corner pulling his thumb out of a good pie and declaring himself a good boy. He imagined that they were one and the same boy, and his swollen purple thumb was in the air, and the dam now broke and everything was washed away, and it was a good thing.

But then he regretted the thought. When she wasn’t there, beside him, he missed her, missed the woman she had been when they had first met, her name on his lips like a new found word or a poem learned by heart, her hand in his like something he hadn’t realised was missing and then clung onto for fear of losing again. He missed the person he’d been, too. When love is new the world seems like a shiny thing, a thing of wonder. You see it in a different way when the heart is full. It’s like you have been asleep for a long time, or blind, and love opens your eyes and you discover the world afresh. He missed that.

Found your email and decided to write, it said on the screen. Where had she found his address, he thought, and why had she decided to write? She didn’t even know him, just as he didn’t know her. Cassandra did not return the love of Apollo and the god grew angry and cursed her, spat into her mouth, so that the gift he had so recently given would thereafter be a source of endless pain, for no one would now believe what she said. Can I believe this? he thought. Can I believe in you, cassandra? He imagined her hand in his and he said her name out loud. It worked like a spell on him, her name in his mouth, the spit of a god, a spat curse.

He flipped open his mobile phone and tried calling her. He brought her name up on the tiny screen, pressed to call, and heard it connect. He was sorry, for whatever it was that he’d said. He wanted her back. They could sort things out. It was not too late, surely. He heard it ringing, counted each empty pulse until it put him through to her answer machine. He waited, listening for the beep at the other end after which he could leave a message. He waited, then left no message, shut his phone and laid it on the desk beside the computer keyboard.

I am 25 y.o. girl. A girl, not a woman. Twenty five years old. When does a girl become a woman? he wondered. Cassandra could see into the future, but knowing what was going to happen was no weapon against it happening. Maybe it was this that drove her mad, more than the disbelief of everyone she warned about forthcoming attractions: the destruction of Troy, the death of Agamemnon and Hector, the whole sham of the Trojan Horse. He thought of computer viruses again, corrupting his whole system, wiping out complete files, destroying everything. Coroebus and Orthronus came to the aid of the besieged Troy out of love for Cassandra, just that. He did not delete her message, risked everything for her, a 25 y.o. girl he could only imagine. It was these sorts of things that changed the world.

He sat back in his chair and tried to compose a message he might leave on her phone. Come back, he would say. Please, come back. We can’t leave it here. We’ve come so far. All our tomorrows are planned. The future’s bright, the future’s orange, and yellow and red and pink – any colour you like. Come back. The words played over and over in his head, like a saccharine love-song. He wasn’t even sure that he believed what he was singing, if it wasn’t just something to keep her sweet. Ladies and men once carried scented bags, pomanders, to protect them from disease or to make secret their own foul smells from each other.

I have a picture if you want. He closed his eyes again and dreamed: cassandra in a photograph. And would it really be her in the picture? Her blond hair falling in tangled golden rings about her naked shoulders; her eyes meeting his, her eyes so blue he thought of summer skies and mediterranean seas; the perfect snub of her nose and the delicate jut of her chin; her lips, moist and glossy red, like blood, parted just enough to show her whiter than white teeth. She covers her nakedness without hiding that she is naked, has her arms clasped about her, like an embrace - she embraces herself.

There is another Cassandra in Chaucer’s tale of Troilus and Criseyde where she is an interpreter of dreams. She is not believed there either, and when she correctly interprets Troilus’s dream and reveals Criseyde’s infidelity hidden therein, she is again cursed and out cast, a ‘fool of fantasye’.

It was over. All he had to do was see it. The clock on the wall chucked aside the seconds and minutes, like unopened and unwanted gifts. He heard again the slam of the front door, in his head, and it was something final. It was over. That much was true, whether he believed in it now or tomorrow. She was not coming back. Criseyde left Troilus for Diomede. It is written. You can find the story in Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or penned in a dozen other medieval manuscripts. A man might tear out the words where it is written, and tear the words into a thousand pieces and scatter them on a storm’s wind, but none of this would make it any less so: lovers lie and hearts are fickle as well as true. It is a story as old as time, and yet he had a hard time believing it of her. And even if she did return, would she make him walk on purple, like Clytemnestra did Cassandra, and then have reason enough to slay him?

No need to reply here as this is not my email.

Write me at acassandra8@byemailonline.info.

He began writing, his fingers moving softly across the surface of the keys.

Why me? he wrote. Why bewitch me with your implicit promise of something more? How could you have known that tonight I would be alone and weak? And how will this end? As all love ends? With the world grown cold again and a lover’s hands empty and a mouth full of spat curses. Why me with your unsolicited temptations? What hope have I when even a god may fall foul of your charms? How can I believe anything you say, or anything any woman says from this day forward?

Cassandra saw everything, even her own end at the hands of Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. She understood that walking on purple was a grave affront to the gods and her punishment would be death.

Cassandra means ‘she who entangles men’. He clicked the ‘send’ button and the message was gone. There, it was done. There was no escaping it now, he was ensnared, caught, a willing victim. It was madness, he thought. Madness might suddenly infect a man, he knew that, like an illness, and might make him do something that makes no sense to you or I. Love does that to a man, too, makes him mad, makes him run in circles round a beautiful woman so that she is the centre of everything he thinks and does. But things fall apart. And then when the centre is lost, he spins into oblivion, without design or purpose. And that is another kind of madness, and even a good man may be corrupted by such loss.

He sat in front of his computer screen, waiting for a picture of cassandra to arrive, cassandra naked on a purple satin sheet with her eyes looking for his, or looking for something.