The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

I pushed the bloodied steak residue around on my plate. I didn’t much like asking for what I wanted. There was something undignified about it. Maybe Dad didn’t like asking, either.

Dad made it pretty clear that he thought I was going to screw it up. In Dad’s mind, New York was for people too hungry for life to be anywhere else. I wasn’t hungry enough. I was too safe, behind my camera. I would never just show up in Port Authority without a place to stay. I wouldn’t play guitar in the subway for spare change. I wouldn’t take up with some girl I met on the street and spend my summer afternoons tangled naked in her sheets, waiting for her to figure out that I’m using her before she kicks me out and I have to take the bus home like Bob Dylan. I see a girl who makes my head swim and I get so freaked out at the thought of even talking to her that I can barely touch her elbow.

Even when I think I’m living, I’m still just watching.

But I have a plan. I have a plan, to start living.

I count 932 divots in the dormitory ceiling tile before I drift off to sleep.





CHAPTER 4


I rub my fingers over my eyes and indulge in a ten-second fantasy of punching Tyler in the face. I mean, I wouldn’t really. I’ve only really ever been in one fight, when I was eight. And I lost. Big-time. But today I let myself get really detailed, imagining my fist connecting out of nowhere with the bridge of Tyler’s nose. I can feel the wet splintering under my knuckle when the bone breaks. I can feel warm blood coursing from his face.

It’s pretty satisfying.

“Look at this crap,” Tyler says for the tenth time in as many minutes. “We can’t use any of this. The hell did you do to my settings, man?”

We’re back in the editing room, and it’s ten thirty at night, which means we’re getting kicked out in half an hour. Tyler’s just gotten his 16 millimeter film back from the lab. For the past week he hasn’t shut up about it. This, I’m to understand, is what’s going to really set Shuttered Eyes apart from all the other Scorsese-rip-off crap our classmates will be showing at workshop. He wants to edit together his color video footage from the park with the soft-filter night film stock we took on the Bowery, and somehow that’s all going to come together in a visual tone-poem about the state of the human soul in transcendent meditation.

I guess. God, I don’t know.

I still have to get the music dubbed into my documentary, which is due in a week, for the second workshop screening. I’m calling it Most. It’s people of all different ages, on the street or at school or in restaurants or wherever, talking straight to the camera, confessing what they want most. It’s actually turning out better than I thought it would. It never ceases to amaze me what people will say to a camera that they won’t say to a regular person. All that’s missing is a couple more interviews, the title sequence, and the transitional music. I’m not worried about it, exactly, but in the back of my mind I have this idea that if I can just make it good enough . . . Maybe . . . If the film professors really like it . . .

I’m too superstitious to think about that right now. So far, it’s going okay. And I’m not quite the artiste Tyler is. I can work on my laptop in the dorm. Tyler needs capital E editing equipment. Sometimes I want to get him jodhpurs and a beret, he’s so invested in his “directorial persona.” I think that would tick him off, though.

“I didn’t do anything,” I say, each word deliberate, so that Tyler will hear how pissed off I’m getting.

“Well, somebody did something. Look at this.”

He speeds through the film again on the Steenbeck, and the filter shots of tea lights and crystals smear into an indistinct blur.

“What did you expect it would look like?” I ask, leaning my head in my hands. “We used a filter. And the light was lower than we planned for. Of course everything’s going to be hard to make out.”

“Bullshit, man. You talk like you’ve never seen that Paris Hilton video.”