She kept going on like that for a long time. And even though I loved to hear it, all those words—repeated and twisted around on themselves, rising from a whisper to a kind of woozy singsong—started to scare me a little. She wasn’t going crazy or telling herself lies so strong that she started to believe them. She wasn’t losing her mind as she kept on talk-talk-talking. It was more like she was making her mind, right there with me, making herself out of words. Beginning, middle, and end: like a movie. The theme music, the opening shot of the film, the credits, and now the big escape scene. She was creating herself, like a movie creating pictures and voices in the darkness of the theater. From nothing to the biggest, wildest something I’d ever known.
Suddenly, she was quiet. She pulled me close and put her lips to mine. We kissed, hard and long. Her breath went into me and mine went into her. The whole world fell away like the dissolve shot, where the camera focuses on one thing and rest of the scene goes blurry and disappears. No words anymore. No sounds at all. It was just me and Anna Z. Then she pulled away a little bit, and we sat there, forehead to forehead, as though her thoughts could go straight from her brain into mine. I let it happen, or maybe I just pretended. Either way, it felt the same. I could see what was inside her mind. I could hear the words without her saying them out loud.
If before she made me feel dizzy and weird—now I was totally drunk. Over the years, I’d seen hundreds of people at the Angelus who’d had too much wine and spirits. They staggered and giggled, talked too loud or whispered like lunatics. They danced real close and slow in the great ballroom. Very romantic. Once, a man in his evening clothes opened the window, climbed out on the ledge, and stood there all night yelling at the sky about some girl he loved and lost. Hermann’s men got him back in eventually. I’d seen the whole thing from my window, and it was sad when his yelling stopped. His voice had been so free, so overflowing with what he felt. That’s how I was with Anna Z at the station. Drunk, though I’d never even tasted wine.