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.
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.”
Okay. I have to give him that one. That was, like, the defining moment of sixth grade. I’m basically scarred for life now.
“Come on. That was digital,” I point out.
He stops the film with an irritated punch of a button and then scrolls it forward in slow motion. I peer over his shoulder into the viewfinder.
The frame looks grubby from smoke and low light, just as I remember the room. I see my own shape in the background, fiddling with the microphone. I can pretty much make out most of the people I remember being there—the guy in the Rangers jersey, the banker dude, the teenage girl with her baby. The focus hazes in and out as Tyler adjusts the lens. The camera zeroes in on the tabletop, with its hunks of crystal and its plastic Ouija pointer thing. Then the frame vibrates, and I see Tyler’s shoulder move into the frame, gesticulating to me.
I narrow my eyes, watching. Me-on-film rolls his eyes, leans the boom mike in the velvet curtains, and climbs around the edge of the room. This is all how I remember it. The camera stays on the tabletop, where not much is happening. All at once an eye looms into view, and Tyler stops the film.
“See?” he says, as if the source of his irritation should be obvious.
The eye—Tyler’s, I can tell by the almond shape, short lashes, and the heavy liner—hovers in an angry blur, staring at us.
“I don’t see what the problem is.” I yawn and check my watch.
“Wait,” Tyler says.
He starts the film again. The eye disappears. The camera moves a little, as though someone is fiddling with the tripod under it. In the edge of the frame, the medium—Blavatsky—winds a scarf around her head, and people start finding their seats. I notice Maddie, wedged at the table between two khaki mo
ms. She gives a knowing smile to the camera, and then she looks away. A finger twirls in her hair.
“Listen,” I say, my mind on my own workshop film, and also on a seven-layer burrito from Taco Hell. “It’s getting late.”
“Here,” Tyler says, not listening. He stops the film again. “Look.”
It’s me, moving back around the table. There are so many people gathered around that it’s hard to see me through the crowd of bodies. I come to a stop, leaning forward. So far, I’m not seeing anything weird. Then, the medium dims the lights, throwing the room into candlelight.
“See?”
“Tyler.” I’m getting sick of this. My stomach growls in agreement. “I’m gonna go.”
“Hang on.” He fumbles with the Steenbeck, and the film starts spooling again through the reels.
“The film is fine. Everything looks fine. You just have to decide what you’re going to use. I can’t keep sitting here waiting for you to make a decision.”
Tyler glowers at me. I don’t think he’s used to me not going along with his vision.
“But I can’t use any of it,” he insists.
I stand up, slinging my backpack over one shoulder. Outside the editing room, someone snaps off the light in the hallway. The building has that dead feeling that buildings get when they’re emptying of people. Distant voices, and footsteps receding.
“What are you talking about?” I ask him, unable to keep the irritation out of my voice.
“The forms, man.” He punches stop again, and the frame freezes.
“You have all the forms.”
“I don’t have hers,” he says, lifting his chin at the image on the screen.
When I see it, my scalp tightens, the hair on my arms stands up, and I drop my backpack on my foot with a thud. I realize, too late, that my video camera is in there.
There, hovering in freeze-frame, half obscured behind the velvet curtain, stands the girl with the hipster-curled hair. That milky skin. God. She’s so beautiful that for instant I’m afraid I’m going to be sick.
She’s peering around the curtain like a little kid playing hide-and-seek. Her hand holds the curtain next to her cheek, and I can just see a pale shoulder where her dress is slipping down. The crease of flesh at the top of her armpit is showing, and the contrast between collarbone and swell of girl flesh momentarily distracts me. Her dark eyebrows are arched, and she’s looking at something just offscreen. Her face looks curious, maybe even surprised. She’s standing just behind Maddie, who sits in frozen attention, bent over her phone.
“What’s she looking at?” I ask. My voice sounds hollow in my ears.
“Who cares?” Tyler says, flicking his fingers against his thumb as though tossing away an invisible cigarette butt. “The point is, I can’t put this online unless I have her release. And you didn’t get it.”
“What?”
“You didn’t get it. You were too intent on buying pizza for some skank.”
I glare at him, a hot burst of rage exploding in my chest. I work my jaw, and my molars grind together.
“You can still present at workshop. Who cares?” I point out.
“Who cares about fucking workshop?” Tyler yells. “Listen, I know this is just, like, summer school for you, or whatever, but you are aware that this is important to me, right?”
I’m surprised and annoyed by how upset Tyler seems. When we met the first day of class he’d made a big thing about how he actually grew up in the city. He called it that, too: the city. As if there were only one in the entire world. He knew all the subway lines, and he knew how to hail a taxi, and he taught us not to take the black cars ’cause they’ll rip you off, and once he got us into a nightclub by being on the list. And he wasted so much money on film stock, it was ridiculous. I mean, who doesn’t shoot digital? You might as well get a thousand dollar bills together and light a campfire with them at the lake. So from the first week I’d assumed he was some rich Manhattan kid who was parked in summer school so his parents could get him out of the co-op while they got divorced in peace. There’re people like that in Madison, too. I just wasn’t friends with any of them.
Tyler fixes me in a stare that is boiling with rage, and then looks away. Swallowing my own anger, I lower back into the chair next to him.
“I’m sorry,” I manage to say. The words feel sour in my mouth.
Tyler doesn’t look at me. He shrugs a dismissive shoulder.
“No, you’re right,” I force myself to continue. “I said I’d help you with the sound and the releases. You’re right. I’m sorry.”
I wonder if this will be enough to get him to chill out. I wonder if I will ever have the nerve to put my own work ahead of other people’s. I wonder why I let myself get pulled into these situations over and over again.
Tyler meets my gaze. For a second I’m worried he’s going to cry, and the possibility makes me panicky because I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, and because I know he’d be angry at me for seeing that, and he’d be a dick to me afterward.
He takes a long breath.
“Okay,” he says at length.
“Okay,” I agree, though I’m not entirely sure what I’m agreeing to.
“At least she wasn’t blocking the whole shot like I thought,” he goes on, wiping his eye with a fist. “She doesn’t turn up until that part at the end. It means I can use all the table shots for transition.”
“Yeah.” I nod. Something vaguely bothers me about this. But I’m not sure what.
“My workshop’s in three days, so you should have plenty of time.”
Tyler slides a blank form across the table to me. The frozen image of the girl with hipster-curls hair hovering in the editing deck viewfinder seems to be looking at me. Her mouth is open as if she’s about to say something, or like she’s trying to get my attention.
“I should have plenty of time? I mean, I have a bunch more interviews to do and I’ve gotta dub in my music and stuff, but yeah, I’ll finish.” I eye the form without picking it up.
“No,” Tyler says slowly. “Plenty of time to find her.”
“How the hell am I supposed to do that?”
“How should I know? Ask the medium. She had to pay, right? Maybe her name’s on a receipt. It’s up to you.”
There’s no way I’m going to do that. I stand up again, leaving the form on the table.
“Tyler, I said I was sorry,” I say. I pick up my backpack and feel around inside it to make sure the camera is okay. It is. No shards, anyway.
“I heard you.” Tyler glares up at me.
“Come on, man. What else can I say? You were right. Honestly, I don’t see what the big deal is.”
“The big deal . . .” He’s clearly getting super-pissed at me. It occurs to me that he might have been indulging in fantasies of crushing my nose at the same time that I was fantasizing about crushing his. “Is that I’ve got a shot at gallery representation. Okay? Do you have any idea what that means?”
I actually do have some idea what that means. Not that I believe him.
“You’re kidding.”
“Do I look like I’m kidding?” Tyler stares up at me, hard.
“What kind of gallery representation?” I ask with suspicion.
I’m not about to go combing the streets of New York City just so that he can have his crap experimental film shown in some basement art space owned by the daughter of one of his dad’s banker friends. I’m sick of propping up his fantasy life. We both know Tyler’s going to go back to school in the fall and switch his major to business administration and stop wearing eyeliner and that’s going to be the end of it. Then he’ll use the fact that he once majored in film as a way to pick up PR girls when he gets off at night from his i-banker job. I’ve only been in New York for, like, five weeks, and I already understand how Tyler’s life is going to unfold. I’d
put money on it.
Sometimes, I hate him for it.
“I met this girl who works at Gavin Brown, okay? Last week, at this opening. I was telling her about Shuttered Eyes, and she said she wants to see the cut when it’s done. She needs to see it on my website.” He stares at me with begging eyes.
“Gavin Brown?” I say with surprise. “Are you serious?”
Tyler nods.
“Like, Gavin Brown, Gavin Brown?”
I can’t hide that I’m impressed. That’s a real place. It gets people in the Whitney Biennial. Art collectors, real ones, actually buy stuff at Gavin Brown. And they want Tyler’s art film? How is that even possible? I catch myself wondering if maybe Tyler has some talent that I haven’t seen. But by looking at him I can tell that Tyler knows this is real. This is probably the most real thing that has ever happened to him.
Sometimes, it’s hard to know opportunity when it happens, Gran said when she gave me the tuition money. At the time, I thought she was kidding.
Slowly Tyler holds out the image-release form to me.
“I have so much left to do, Wes. For serious. I have to edit all the different film stocks into one file and I haven’t even picked my music yet. As it is, I don’t think I’ll be sleeping between now and workshop. I’m gonna run out of time. But you’ve got a week longer than me before yours is due. Please? I won’t make it otherwise.”
He looks truly pathetic. Wheedling, almost.
I hesitate.
Then I take it.
“No promises,” I say.
“Thank you,” Tyler says, relief flooding his face. “No, seriously. Thank you.”
The Appearance of Annie Van Sinderen Page 4