The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

I stuff my phone back in my shorts pocket without responding. I need time to think of something good. My fingers interlace behind my head, and I stare up at the ceiling tiles.

“You’re going to have to put the effort in, Wes,” my dad’s voice plays on a tape in my brain. I hate that I can still hear him from a thousand miles away. “You can’t just hide behind your video camera all the time. Watching life happen to other people.”

I frown and roll onto my side, away from him.

My dad came to the Village when he was my age, determined to be the next Bob Dylan. He dropped out of UW, panhandled bus fare, and showed up in Port Authority with nothing but a change of boxer shorts, thirty-six bucks, a jean jacket, and a guitar. I think he was surprised there wasn’t a committee of folkies waiting to welcome him with open arms and a bunk in a commune squat. Nobody told him that by 1975, it was already too late. Not even Bob Dylan wanted to be Bob Dylan anymore.

Dad lasted a month sleeping on some girl’s floor before he ran out of money. She let him stay on another couple of weeks after he went broke, and his mouth always twists in a funny way when he gets to that part of the story. After a while the girl met somebody else, and Dad called home collect to beg Gran and Grandpa to wire him some money. Then he packed up his guitar and took a bus back to Madison. He hasn’t been back to New York since. It’s not the same now, he likes to point out. It’s nothing like what it used to be.

When I applied to come here for summer school, I started hearing this story a lot. Before that, he never seemed to know what to talk about with me. I never tried to play guitar. I never talked about wanting to go somewhere else, and he never shut up about it. He never understood that getting out of Madison was easy for me. I spent most of junior high deep in World of Warcraft, erecting complex pixelated walls between myself and reality.

But I didn’t feel like I was hiding. I felt like I was watching.

I started getting into filmmaking in high school. Anime, at first. I wanted to learn how to program video games. I’d make little movies on my phone and stuff, too. But then my mom gave me a Sony HDR CX900 for my eighteenth birthday. I found the real world was more interesting than I thought. When I looked at life through the camera, I felt like I could finally see it.

I’d thought about applying to NYU for college, but Dad didn’t think I could handle it. I never got a straight answer on what part he didn’t think I could handle. Whatever. Most of my friends and my girlfriend were going to UW anyway.

UW doesn’t have a film school, though. I do communications arts, which is basically the same thing. But sometime freshman year, I just . . . I don’t know. Okay, the breakup was part of it. Seeing Instagrams of her with some guy in the dorm two doors down from me basically ripped out my soul. But around that time, too, I started feeling detached from myself. Like no time was passing. Every restaurant and café, my friends’ dorm rooms, my ex-girlfriend’s parents’ driveway, all were haunted by versions of myself that I was done with. Walking around UW, eating at Dotty’s, seeing the same people from high school, made me angry at myself.

I applied to NYU for summer film classes on the last day before the deadline, never thinking I’d get in. But I did. I had to borrow the money from my grandparents, which was embarrassing. Grandpa is pretty out of it now, so he probably hasn’t noticed that I’m gone, but Gran seemed pleased with herself, when I called her about it. Like she’d been waiting.

“We’d have given it to your father, you know, if he asked,” she whispered in my ear the day she slid me a check. I pocketed it without opening it.

I was wearing Dad’s sport coat, which is too big. It makes me look like David Byrne.