It was in this frame of mind that I first encountered Annabel. After a long night with my heart pressed against the dented metal edge of the bar at the old Claireborn Hotel, recently renamed the Erie Downtowner but still as shabby as ever, still dark with old, scarred tables and chairs with stained cushions, the carpet still stained and threadbare, the air, though now “smoke free” still stale with the ghosts of cigars and sixty years of filterless griefs, yet “fragrant with gin” as Twain might have said—after such another long night, I had staggered to the sidewalk and then down State to the docks, there to fill my lungs with lake oxygen seasoned with the diesel fumes of barges and freighters, spiced with whatever gases of hospital waste the ships had dredged up. There I stood against the rail and let the night lap against me. From time to time I heard footsteps in the dark but never once looked up. I smiled at the water I could hear but not see, smiled at the thought of black unconsciousness, and only hoped it would come quickly if it came, no mere mugger’s threats and demands, no bargaining for my life, which I was not inclined to do. Unfortunately I was not interfered with. In time, I made my way back up State to Perry Square and there claimed a bench as my own chair of forgetfulness. But the power of the chair had apparently leaked away, or been diluted by dog piss, or rattled away by all the blows of all the blow jobs and anal fucks and fingerings and baby puke and ice cream drips and farts and soiled diapers of all its days and nights because I could forget nothing, not a single blow of my own.
Another hour passed. And then…and then the sound of pain at a gallop. I did not recognize it as such at the time and can hear it so only now in retrospect, but that is surely what it was, more pain than I had ever known, more wrenching of a soul I thought already wrenched apart. It came in the guise of a young girl jogging, only a slim figure of gray at first, a girl made of mist who emerged from the mist, then bare legs and bare arms as she trotted down the path toward my bench, a slender loop of wire hanging from each ear, swinging as she ran. I heard the music as she approached and wondered how her ears could tolerate such noise, the thump of heavy drums and screaming chant. Stride by stride, she closed the distance, oblivious to me. I was a charcoal lump on an otherwise empty park bench. She had no doubt passed this bench a hundred times before at this hour, always empty then, so, therefore, she must have assumed without even thinking about it, empty now. She was nearly upon me when I registered on her consciousness. She gasped, stopped short, and jerked to the side, stumbled off the edge of the path, twisted an ankle, and fell, and too aghast to speak, only huddled there and stared.
I raised both hands. “I’m not moving,” I said.
She fumbled at a little bag attached around her waist. “I have pepper spray!”
“You won’t need it. I swear. I’m not moving an inch.” I must have bitten my lip, for I tasted blood and whiskey in my mouth. It both chilled and intoxicated me.
“Jesus,” DeMarco said. “Is this supposed to be funny?”
Below the entry, Huston had written Strive for Nabokovian prose? Maybe similar but contemporary, less self-conscious, more like Bukowski?
DeMarco pulled a tablet close and on the first page wrote Who is Bukowski?
Huston’s next entry was dated one day later:
There is to her eyes a nakedness that denudes me. Her nakedness is an innocence more than primal. I imagine she could lay with me, let me do all manner of dark things, every base act I have ever conceived, yet her eyes would shine with purity. They are greener than polished jade and brighter than jade in full sun. In them I see myself more than bare: transparent. With every stain and cancer streak of sordid self etched out like oil spilled on snow.
DeMarco flipped to a clean page in his tablet, and at the top of it in large letters, he wrote Annabel. Below the name he wrote appears innocent and, below that, green eyes.
The next two entries were undated. They were separated by several lines and were the only writing on that page:
I have fallen in love with a dying girl. Anyway, she says she is dying, though she looks as healthy and sensuous as a Triple Crown winner.
When she sleeps, I want to ravish her. I want to devour her, swallow her down as a boa constrictor would a fawn. Then I would lick her taste off my lips and lie in the sun with her inside me, and I would sleep until her every cell has been absorbed into mine.
A troubling thought kept apace with DeMarco’s reading: Who is this character? Is this Huston imagining how a sick, deranged man thinks?
Then came an even more troubling thought: What if this isn’t Huston’s character speaking? What if this is Huston himself?
“Jesus fucking Christ,” DeMarco said.
A minute later, he reached for his calendar. The opening scene entry had been written on a Sunday, the next on Monday, the others undated. DeMarco asked himself why every entry wasn’t dated. Was Huston in a rush sometimes? Or were all entries from one day given just the one date? Did it even matter?
Nathan Briessen had said that Huston thought he had finally discovered his Annabel at a strip club, maybe six weeks before his disappearance. But what if he had met her prior to that? Something about the woman had resonated with him, stuck to his consciousness. Maybe he was smitten, maybe not. Next day, he was still thinking about her. Maybe Thursday night he went to her club for the first time. Would she have told him, when they first met, that she was a topless dancer? She must have. Maybe he had told her about the book he was writing. Maybe she had recognized him—maybe she was the smitten one! In any case, Huston had made the last entry, the one about eating her alive, on an undesignated date.
On his notepad DeMarco wrote:
Did he become obsessed with Annabel and end up killing her?
Did Annabel help to kill his family?