Annie Mae Sutherland's days are filled, moment to moment, hour to tolling hour, with Elijah Wood.
She writes about him obsessively, whenever she can fit pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, wrestling with half-familiar phrases, with syntax that always seems to turn on her like a striking snake in mid-sentence, with words that never look right no matter how she spells them; Annie is not, as a rule, a highly verbal person, though she has found considerable relief from that handicap in a sea of netspeak that uses "2" for "to" and "rite" for "right" and "neways" for "anyway."
She writes about him obsessively. Her room is filled with it, reams and reams, cluttering up the elderly wardrobe that Annie's family still calls a chifforobe, piled on the little schoolhouse table that serves her for a desk. In all of those stories there is a lovely, gifted young woman named Anne or Annabelle or Amalie; and she meets Elijah in the studio cafeteria, she stops to fix his car when it has broken down on the side of the road, she sells him coffee or sits next to him at a baseball game or is his sister's best friend, and always, always, he falls desperately in love with her.
In theory, her bedroom is papered with a faded floral print that was bright and cheerful once upon a time, when the inhabitant of that bedroom cut her hair in a bob and taped her breasts flat and danced the jitterbug to the scratchy sounds of a victrola. Every inch of that wallpaper is covered now with posters, with pictures cut carefully out of magazines, with newspaper articles and printed-out web pages and publicity photos, and from every one of them Elijah watches her like a display of identical dolls in a toy store window.
Outside the light has turned rich and golden, gilding the church steeple; and the leaves have burst into color, flame caught in amber. Annie does not look out her window anymore. In California it is always summer, and the turning year has no color brilliant enough to match Elijah's eyes.
Just for today, Elijah has a dog, a little Aberdeen terrier named Benji. When he gets up in the morning, blinking against the sunlight that paints his room in a gentle golden wash, the dog is there to greet him. He whistles softly to it, combing his fingers sleepily through his hair as he wanders into the kitchen, not bothering to throw on a robe over his t-shirt and boxers (Annie Mae has the vague idea that in California it is never cold) and he feeds the dog before he makes coffee. He drinks Columbian coffee – strong, made from fresh-ground beans – out of a white mug with "Las Vegas" printed on it in bold, colorful lettering. He has had the mug for years, and there is a chip in the rim from where he once reached absently for it, not looking, and knocked it into the sink. He and the dog stand in the sunlit kitchen in companionable silence, the dog eating, Elijah drinking his coffee and looking out the window.
Annie Mae has lain with her eyes closed, sunlight bright on her eyelids, and imagined him going through these small, homey rituals more times than she could count if she tried. She feels that it brings her closer to him, that she knows something about him. When she meets him one day, she will look at him and think: I know all about your white mug. I bought one just like it. I could tell you that if I wanted, and you might smile at me. No one else in the crowd will know about their mugs; it will be her secret, hers and Elijah's. And she will feel warm and happy, as if he had entrusted her with something precious.
Perhaps tomorrow Elijah will have a cat.
Outside Annie's window the year is dying, unnoticed and unmourned.
Inside the shadows come early now, sliding slowly over the walls, sinking shelves into deep silent wells, drifting across the floor until Annie looks up from her computer – an elderly PC groaning under the weight of half-finished stories and downloaded jpegs – and finds that night has fallen.
Annie does not like the dark. She feels uneasy when she cannot see her posters and action figures; as if, should she fail to keep a watchful eye on him, Elijah might slip away and vanish. Of late, her room has become awash in candles; aromatherapy candles that fill the room with the faint scent of lavender, candles in the shape of dragons and wizards, plain white candles bleeding wax into faded antique tallow-drips. She has found that she prefers candles to electric lights, a discovery that happened quite by accident.
One evening, when the year had first begun to turn, Annie had lit an aromatherapy candle on the shelf beside her action figures (she has only Frodo; the boat scene's Sam has taken up residence at the bottom of a drawer, dust-covered and forgotten). After the dark had filled her room, she had looked up to see the candlelight flickering over Elijah-as-Frodo's blank plastic face; and for a moment, as she watched, the play of light and shadow had animated that face into something almost like Elijah's expressiveness. Annie, who knows every flicker of expression that passes over Elijah's face in every one of his movies, had watched, fascinated, as the candle drew out Frodo's smile, Casey's fear, Barney Snow's determination and grief. Curious, she had picked up the candle and held it in turn to every one of the hundreds of pictures covering her walls, making her way slowly and methodically around the room, stretching up toward the ceiling and kneeling down to the floorboards, and watched as the candlelight made the images look very nearly alive.
She had barely finished her slow circuit of the room when the sun rose.
Some of her pictures take the candlelight better than others. In some of them, she can see his eyes dance with laughter, with the knowledge of a pleasant secret shared between the two of them. In some of them she can almost see his mouth move to speak, and sometimes she almost believes that if she closes her eyes and listens very hard, if the house is completely quiet as it is in the dead of night, she will hear him speak to her. One picture, an 8x10 black and white glossy photograph bought through a fan club, is her favorite; his face is so happy, so animated, that the candlelight turns the surface of the photograph into a window through which she can watch him as he lives. One night she began an imaginary conversation with this photograph, watching in delight as the flickering changes in expression followed the conversation, and did not notice until the candle guttered that she had been standing in front of the photograph, her muscles stiffening with stillness and cold, for hours.
Annie Mae's room is lit with candles now, and the only electric light it sees is the dim glow of her monitor.
Annie believes in angels.
Or perhaps believes is not the right word. She simply accepts, unquestioning, the fact that they exist, just as she accepts Elijah's existence: she has never met one but has felt their wings brush her, and felt sanctified by the touch. In the parlor downstairs her mother has a collection of angel figurines bought from the newspaper supplements, below the pictures of the beatified Christ that Annie's mother cuts carefully from magazines and hangs framed on the wall over the peeling wallpaper. One of Annie's first memories is being wrapped in warmth and comfort, safe in what she now recognizes as the arms of her own guardian angel. She believes in angels because she knows that they have touched her life.
Elijah hallows whatever he touches. Wherever he goes he makes people's lives better, and happiness follows him like flowers springing from underneath his feet, a miracle. Sometimes Annie wonders if he could heal her by laying hands on her, as if she were a leper. Perhaps he could lay a hand on her shoulder and somehow she would become confident, joyous, beautiful. Blessed.
She knows, because she learned it in Sunday school, that God does nothing without a purpose; there is not a sparrow's fall for which He has no reason. When she has a problem, she does as her mother taught her: closes her eyes, opens her Bible at random, puts her finger upon a sentence, and tries to understand why she was guided to that sentence to help her. Annie's God is a loving God, and when she was a child her favorite hymn was the one that begins "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so..."
(Sometimes Annie is unclear on where God leaves off and Jesus begins. Once a few years ago she asked her pastor. He had begun to answer; and then smiled sadly, and touched her hair, and gently turned the conversation to the stuffed animal drive Annie's Sunday school class was doing for the children's hospital.)
She has often wondered what God's purpose for Elijah will ultimately be. She knows that it must be something wonderful, that God would not put someone like Elijah on Earth and then let him lie fallow as unturned farmland. She wonders if, like his namesake, he will match his faith against (perhaps The Terrorists) and trounce them so soundly that they will come back to the arms of God who loves even them. Or perhaps he will be like Mother Theresa, bringing light to the lives of the poor and ill in places that other people are afraid to go. But Annie sees the light shine from him, and knows that whatever purpose God has for him, it must be special indeed.
In Annie's small DVD collection there is one movie, only one, that does not star Elijah. She dislikes foreign movies. Everyone looks as if they ought to look familiar and are strange instead, and the subtitles go by so quickly that she misses half of what everyone says. But this one called to her from the moment she saw it in the video store; and she sits in the dim candlelight and watches Wings of Desire, and slowly begins to understand.
