The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

“You have a . . . what?” I sit up.

“Look, can we talk about it tomorrow? I’ve really got to go.” She’s pulling her bag over her shoulder and rolling on some lip gloss and is clearly ready to leave.

“Oh.” I can’t keep the confusion out of my voice. How can she have a curfew? She lives in a squat with a rich, alcoholic gutter punk named Janeanna! Doesn’t she? In a flash I realize that of course she doesn’t. “Okay,” I say, trying not to sound annoyed.

I get up, find her with some difficulty, and fold her into my arms. She stiffens against the embrace, but then relaxes into it when she senses I’m not trying anything, even letting herself lean her cheek on my shoulder for a long minute. I comb my fingers through her hair where it falls down her back.

Standing there in the dark, holding her, warm and soft and lemony, my eyelids start to get heavy. When she says, “Okay,” and breaks free from my arms, I sway where I’m standing.

I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired.

“Good night, Wes.”

By the door, she hesitates.

“Good night, Maddie. You going to get home okay? Should I get you an Uber?” I ask her, running a hand through the floppy part of my hair.

“I’ll get a cab,” she says. “Don’t worry about it.”

I wrestle with the idea that I should see her out to the street and into a taxi. I should pull on my sneakers and put on a shirt and walk her down past the security guy and flag down a taxi on the corner and give the cab driver her address (Curfew? What?) and thunk on the top of the cab with my fist and wave good-bye to her, and I absolutely would do all of these things if it weren’t for the solid wall of fatigue that has bricked itself up around me, insisting that under no circumstances will I leave this room.

Instead I say, “Text me when you’re home, okay?”

And she says, “Okay. See you,” and then the door clicks shut.

I crawl into bed, shaking with equal measures of frustrated desire and fatigue. With a groan of appalled surrender I peel my jeans off, grope for a tube sock on the floor, close my eyes, twist my body in the sweat-soaked sheets, and think of her.

? ? ?

A door opens and shuts, and light from the hallway spills into my dreams, causing me to twitch half awake. One eye cracks open just enough to ascertain that Eastlin has gotten back from wherever he was, and he’s silently moving around our room, pulling off his clothes and gathering up his stuff for the shower. I consider asking him how his night was, but before the thought can fully form, sleep has wrapped its fingers around my mind and pulled me down, down, down into the dark.

I’m in the Village, walking down Bowery, but it looks different. At first there are tons of people there, and I feel like I’m supposed to know some of them, but nobody looks familiar, and there’s no sound, it’s like watching a silent film. Then there’s a girl there, in the crowd, dressed in fishnets and cutoffs and platform boots, and I call out, “Maddie,” but she doesn’t hear me. She’s far ahead, and getting farther away, so I run to catch up with her, because there’s something very important I’m supposed to do, but the faster I run, the farther away she gets. She’s getting swallowed by the crowd, but I can just see the back of her head, with her two hipster pigtails brushed forward over her ears. “Maddie!” I shout, but no sound comes out, and all these hands in the crowd are grabbing at me and holding me back so that I can’t move, but I’m still moving somehow. I get closer, almost close enough to touch her burgundy frayed dress, and I stretch my hand forward, I reach out my fingers to touch her, but my hand grabs nothing, and she turns around and stares at me with her bottomless black eyes. Wes? I think she says, but her mouth doesn’t move.