The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

It had been an actual house, I’m pretty sure. But now it’s like I’ve stepped into a scene from The Matrix, except I’m in cargo shorts instead of a patent-leather trench coat and shades. This had once been a nice hallway, narrow, wood floors, with a skinny staircase stretching up to the second story. Huge patches of plaster have peeled off the lathing and fallen from the walls. Treads have been pried from the stairs, open to a black chasm beneath. Pale patches suggest places where architectural remnants—plaster trim, light fixtures, whatever—have been ripped off the walls and sold. A puffy-lettered spray paint mural winds up the stairwell, reading MADCINDERZ in wild style.

I’m gawking, I realize, but I hear footsteps in the dim room to my right, which I guess was once the living room. The windows are boarded up, so what little light there is struggles through chinks in the boards and walls. It smells old, like rotted wood. The light makes patterns of spots across the floor and the walls, and in those spots glitter clouds of dust.

“In here, Miss Madness!” another female voice trills from deep within the bowels of the house.

Suddenly I’m itching to be looking at this scene through my video camera.

“Maddie?” I ask the dim interior.

I follow the sound of footsteps and voices, creeping forward, worried about stepping on a nail. Or a mouse. Or God knows what.

“Check it out! Pizza!” Maddie cries to the other girl.

I round the corner to find Maddie and a wisp of a black girl in giant platform goth boots standing in a room furnished with a stained mattress, a 1950s aluminum kitchen table, a couple kerosene lanterns, a scented candle (grapefruit? weird), a turntable with one huge 1970s speaker, a milk carton full of record albums, a stained corduroy beanbag chair, and a hot plate. There’s a naked lightbulb dangling overhead, fed by an extension cord that tangles across the floor and out a broken window, but the bulb isn’t turned on. Someone’s painted a huge anarchy sign on the wall in white house paint. It’s a nice touch.

“Oooooh. And a delivery boy,” the wisp says with a leer. She runs her tongue over her teeth as she smiles at me.

My backpack is resting on the kitchen table between them. Blood thuds in my ears with my sudden need to hold the camera safely in my hands. I walk up to them with the grocery bag like I do this kind of thing every day, set it on the table with manful authority, and pick up the camera. Maddie notices how anxious I am, though, and arches her eyebrow at me.

“What’d you get?” the wisp asks Maddie as she rummages in the bag.

“Couple forties. Muttar paneer. Drunken noodles. Oh, and, like, a totally fresh pineapple pizza.” Maddie smiles at me through the dark.

“Killer,” the wisp says through a mouthful of pizza. She cracks open a forty and swishes the malt liquor in her mouth, gargles with her head tossed back, then swallows.

“It’s cute. I don’t think Wes here’s ever been Dumpster diving before,” Maddie remarks.

“Wes, huh? What is that, like, a prep school name?” the wisp jeers.

“I dunno,” Maddie says, eyeing me. “Maybe you should ask him.”

“Screw him,” the wisp says, rummaging deeper in the grocery bag.

While they make fun of me I’ve been wrestling my camera out of its case and I’ve fixed it safely to my eye with an exhale of palpable relief. Through the comforting pixels of digital video the scene becomes interesting, instead of scary. I zoom in on the wisp’s face. Her hair is bleached a punk yellow-blond, and she wears it gathered into two heavy braids of dreadlocks on either side of her face. She’s wearing so much eye makeup she looks like she’s been punched in the face.

Or maybe, I realize, she’s been punched in the face.

“So is it just you guys, living here?” I ask, hitting record. The camera whirs to life in my hands.

Her cheeks are so thin that I can see the food moving under her skin as she chews. The wisp completely ignores me, thrusting her arm into the grocery bag looking for more leftovers.

“Sort of,” Maddie answers me. “We’re kind of a collective.”

“What kind of collective?” I ask.