A few days later Chris came home early in the evening with Chinese food and woke up Sean, who had been dreaming of Maryanne.
“Broccoli and fried tofu,” Chris said. “Extra mayonnaise and lettuce. I know you like that.”
Sean went for the Chinese food. In his dream, he had been outside of himself. He was everything there was except for himself. He was all the pure and unpeopled love of the world. He was God, perhaps. He was also an eye. He saw himself and who he understood to be Maryanne, far below, lounging on a gaseous, Neptunish sort of field, lain rosy as shawls — shadowy and shifting as the insides of a thing.
“Let’s rent a movie tonight,” Chris said. “Mutant turtles. Your favorite. Splinter’s Big Revenge.”
Sean was eating the Chinese food. He was back in his dream, drifting through the outer-planet-y world of it, everything soft and purple and destroyed; unpulsing and beautiful as the bland, sweet skin of an eggplant. Was this love? Sean wondered. He put tofu in his mouth.
“I rented this already,” Chris said. “No turtles for you.” He was looking and grinning at Sean, who was staring down at the Chinese food. Chris tossed the movie on the sofa. Sean stared at the food, then moved — quite gracefully, he thought while doing it — to the movie and sat down beside it. “Can you put it in and rewind it?” Chris said. His voice could go high-pitched sometimes, a little beseeching, like a shy person’s in a moment of extroversion, and it did now. “Sean, fast forward the previews?” Sean put his food down, picked up the movie. He remembered a noisy something from childhood, something brotherly and laughing, and felt the tiniest of sadnesses — the sadness of an ant, a mite, and a mosquito — stamping lightly against his heart, like a little rain.
There was a full-length mirror against the TV, and Chris, as he was moving it, now, dropped it. Sean saw on the floor a patch of glass, dark and unsparkling as leaves. Chris did not move for a few seconds; his eyes, Sean saw, were unfocused; his mouth unmoving and wet, imbedded in his head like a flat and creamy stone.
“It’s just a mirror,” Sean said.
Chris got a broom and swept the glass into a pile of clothes. He carried the broken mirror to his bed, then to the front door. “Don’t worry so much,” Sean said. “It’s a mirror.” Though he often caught himself assuming — wishing, probably — that everyone was the same, Sean knew that he and his brother (and everyone else) were hopelessly, and mysteriously, he felt, different. Chris set the mirror against the TV, back in its original place. The top half of it was intact, in a blade, like a guillotine. Sean felt anxious.
Chris went to his bed and lay on it, facing the window.
“Do you want to watch the movie?” Sean said.
Chris made a noise and sustained it. The noise got louder, then stopped.
Sean put the movie in. My brother deserves to be happy, he thought. What can happen in this world? he wondered nauseously. Can anything ever really happen? He looked at the sofa. He lay on it. The movie was not rewound. Sean watched the end credits and fell asleep.
“Next time I’ll bring Maryanne here,” Annie said to Sean. “What do you think?”
“Okay,” Sean said. He lay under blankets on the sofa. Chris was in the shower; had been singing loudly, but had then stopped.
Annie was jumping, now, on the bed. “Sometimes I think I’m all these different people at once,” she said while jumping. “Like five people. And they all want to use this same brain. And this brain’s tired. This brain says, ‘Four of you need to go,’ and sometimes I start myself to go, because why should I get priority over these other four people?” Annie sat and smiled at Sean.
Sean tried to focus on his own life. “Have you seen Annie Hall?” he said. He had wanted to say something about his own life.
“No. But one time I dreamed I was Woody Allen,” she said. “No one liked me anymore. People chased me in a hotel. Then I jumped out a window. I survived the fall, but there was a nail in my stomach. I walked a little and I thought, ‘Well, I’ll go make a movie now.’ ” Annie yawned very slowly and quietly. Her mouth opened wide. Sean looked at her teeth, the private collection of them, packed tightly inside of her small, elegant head, like a secret behind the face, a white and shocking hobby. It made Sean nervous. He felt perilous, then fleeting, and then a little excited.
“Woody Allen’s Annie Hall,” Annie said. “That’s so sad. I mean, I don’t know. Is it sad?”
Sean didn’t remember what that movie was about. He remembered something about tennis, the hardness and slowness of tennis, the incapacitation of it, unmasterable as a bad dream, how the tennis ball would always soar from the racket — like a surface-to-air missile — over fences and walls. “Woody Hall,” Sean said.
Annie laughed. “Annie Flame,” she said. “That should be my pen name. I’ve written a novel.” She stared at Sean. “Annie Flame would be my pen name and in interviews I’d take from a duffel bag a metal spike, one of those railroad ones. I’d say I was thinking of getting my forehead pierced. I’d hold the spike to my forehead, to demonstrate. I’d quote myself constantly. Myself and one other person. Einstein. That would be my career plan. In real life, I’d have this other persona — of sanity and love. It makes me sad, talking like this. I should stop.”
Sean smiled pleasantly, quite naturally, which surprised and pleased him. “What’s your novel called?”
“It’s, ‘Ten Digital Photographs of Eleven Tiny, Tortured Souls.’ ” Annie looked at Sean. “That’s not what it’s called,” she said.
Chris came out of the bathroom in an audible thrust of steam, like an occult appearance — fully dressed. His face was wet. “Annie,” he said. “I feel bad again today.” Annie went to him and hugged him and they went out somewhere.
Sean moved from the sofa to the bed. I maneuvered deviously from the sofa to the bed, he thought. He was just a child, he knew. A little boy. He had written a novel, though. He, too, had written a novel. There were clams in the novel. A pile of them, on some lost and lightless seafloor; trembling, making whizzing noises, like straws, and then shooting apart, finally — exploding — from the force of bemusement and lovelessness. The clams were symbolic somehow; they had to have been. Or had they? It was a desperate, unfun novel — very strange, told with an incomprehensible sort of irony. It had real people also, not just clams. Sean had spent a year on it — a year, he now realized, that he remembered nothing about. Try harder to remember your own life from now on, Sean thought, and then fell into a dreamless sleep. When he woke, he went immediately and took a shower. He walked out into the night, thinking languageless thoughts. He felt new and released — newly released, like some rare and squinting animal; a flying wombat or African wild ass. His eyes felt complex and weightless inside his head. He ran suddenly across a street. At night, he knew, there could be the belief that something never before felt might be felt, something new. You could allow yourself quite easily this view of the world — this thrilling, midnightly faith — of there being something out there that loved you, that, at night, worshipped and searched for you, like a past life seeking its next, wanting desperately the continuation of itself. And though it would probably never find you, it would also, you believed at night, never give up, and this was enough — that something was out there and desperate and on its way. This was less in the city, though. In the city, it was mostly just too loud. There were too many buses. Sean went to a sushi place on St. Marks. He had miso soup, and ice water. Maryanne, he thought. Who is Maryanne? He looked across the restaurant at his waitress — a dark and neighborly thing, sort of ominous — and thought, I am in love with that person; then went home and dreamt the discolored dream of being in love with someone who did not exist. He woke and did not stop himself (Maryanne, he thought, Maryanne, Maryanne) as there was a worldless sort of desire — a faithless, gaping, windstorm-y thing — that could swell in you as you had to end one day and move into the next; and to relieve this, the indestructible hole of it, you made severe and alarming promises of nothing and everything; you built elaborate thoughts, like houses — mansions, other worlds — and you moved, wrenchingly, stupidly, in; not knowing, feeling, or believing anything, except that you had arrived, made it to some sort of love, some vaporization of love, like a cream of water, perhaps, but a love nonetheless, in this vast and lacerated place inside your head, inside your thoughts, and so could, finally, then, sleep.