Everything I can prove about Anna Marie Moon’s powers of foresight is currently being reduced into four minutes and fifty-eight seconds of sight and sound.
When I first saw Anna Marie Moon, it was in a hostel kitchen in San José, Costa Rica. She was wearing a woven top, reds and oranges and a touch of seafoam blue, the type that had an empty back and no bra. She was eating ice. The ice had been shaped into fish. She was explaining to a hostel worker that her diet varied from day to day. Some days she was vegan. Some days she ate halal. Some days she was gluten free, or had a peanut allergy, or practiced a fad diet like Atkins or keto. Today was her water fast. For a bit of fun, she froze her “meals” into different shapes, like pizza or drumsticks or sausage rolls.
“This one may look like an ordinary ice cube,” she said, giving the cube a dainty lick, “but it’s actually a cube of watermelon without any of the melon.”
I had come to Costa Rica to escape. I wasn’t sure what I was escaping from. My last job had ended a month prior, and I wasn’t close with my family. There were no big obligations on my shoulders. I didn’t own property, I didn’t own a car, I didn’t have a spouse or children, and even though, like most people, I had a massive student debt, I ignored it. I had nothing, and maybe that was the thing worth escaping.
When you don’t know what to do with your life, you go to the beach.
The second time I saw Anna Marie Moon was on the beach. We had both migrated east. It was well known that the western coast of Costa Rica was “the rich side,” shoulder to shoulder with expensive resorts, touring families, McDonalds and Starbucks. The east coast was for the locals and the bums. We stayed in Puerto Viejo, near Salsa Brava, a beach famous for its powerful waves, incredible surfing, and the shallow, sharp rocks that could tear the skin off of careless surfers.
Anna Marie Moon looked like a legged mermaid by the surf, noodled lithely along an emerald cloth. She hosted a modest crowd, men and women from different parts of the world. Like me, they were all in their mid-20s. Unlike me, they had color and shape. Beautiful people. Confident people. Anna Marie Moon caught my eye and did something unexpected. She leaped to her feet, danced over to me, and gave me a hug.
We had never talked before. I didn’t even know her name at the time.
But, she remembered me from the hostel in Costa Rica.
“I predicted I’d see her again, soon enough,” she said to her little group. She sent me a wink. “C’mon, you can chill with us. It’s Thalita, right?”
I sat next to her on the green cloth. Our arms brushed electrically from time to time. She guided the group in conversation, swept them up in her natural charm. I couldn’t pay attention to what anyone was saying; I could only wait in excitement for her to make another sweeping gesture so that our arms would touch again. As the sun went down, turning the sand from white to gold, a thought swirled around the edges of my mind.
How did she guess my name was Thalita?
************
I used to film hogs.
When I was growing up in the nineties, nothing made me happier than watching MTV or VH1 with a bag of sour candies. Music videos were my life. It wasn’t the music I loved so much as the videos. Or rather, the way the videos elevated the music.
Unlike movies, where the video and audio are designed together as a complete package, music is something that exists, fully formed, upon recording. Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is a complete work of art even without the video. The same with “Take on Me” by A-ha, or U2’s “With Or Without You.” This doesn’t diminish the video aspect—in fact, the opposite. A great music video is art squared. So the question with music videos is, how do you use video to make the song better? How do you take what exists, in all its established vision, and make it more visionary? Give it more gravitas? Edit and shape it so that its brilliance works on a whole new level?
I spent years in pursuit of answering this question. I saved up for my own camera and shot various scenes overlayed to Kate Bush and Smash Mouth and TLC. I’d record traffic jams, planes landing, slow pans over excerpts from old books like The Physiologus and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I studied every hit music video. Christopher Walken floated through my dreams while Madonna did the “Thriller” dance in Gorillaz-style 2D while wearing a Devo hat.
Eventually, I got accepted into university, where I got my Masters of Arts in Film and Media Studies, with a focus on music videos. The only thing I didn’t anticipate was that, a decade into the 2000s, music videos would no longer be popular. Sure, a few Beyoncés and the occasional “Gangnam Style” would go viral on YouTube, but MTV and VH1 were essentially dead.
That’s when I started filming hogs.
As it turned out, my skill set wasn’t completely defunct. My work with cameras, audio, editing, planning, all lent themselves naturally to reality television. My big break was a show called Wild Boars. I spent a year in Texas and Arkansas with a sparse film crew, two “Hog Hunters,” and a truck-trailer of six pigs. Each episode, someone would call the Hog Hunters in melodramatic desperation, complaining about a wild pig causing trouble in their yard or neighborhood or public park. I’d lead the film crew into the nearby woods and fields as the Hog Hunters used expertise and cunning to wrangle the “wild” pigs into their trailer.
Then, we’d release those same pigs into a new location and start again.
After twenty episodes were filmed and edited, we were canceled. Only three episodes ever aired. The network received an email from a viewer wondering why the wild hogs all seemed to have similar markings. That was enough for the higher-ups to reevaluate whether their investment was paying off. It wasn’t.
I was embarrassed. Not only was my dream job no longer real, not only was I stooping so low as to hunt fake animals, but even that wasn’t good enough. I scraped together some funds to disappear for a short time in South America. I almost gave up down there, melted into the ocean.
As I sit here, curled over my laptop in the dark, editing the images of Anna Marie Moon into a demonstration of her miracles, I remember why I do what I do. I must match video to her music.
************
“What is your dream song?”
“To make into a video?”
Anna Marie Moon was chewing on a square of nori she had “borrowed” from some young men from France. She had wrapped her green cloth around her waist, transforming it from a beach towel to a long skirt. We were sitting at a wooden bench at the hostel. It was a covered community area, a free view of the street and trees that lead to the beach, and a shared outdoor kitchen where a dozen young travelers busied themselves with pots and pans, clearly figuring out how to feed themselves for the first time.
“You must have an ideal song,” she said. “One that doesn’t already have a video.”
I did. The song was called “One of These Things First,” by Nick Drake. I pulled it up on my phone and waited a minute for it to load. As it played, Anna Marie Moon closed her eyes, bobbing rhythmically. Her hair was dark and floaty—a jellyfish of charcoal locks.
I could have been a sailor, could have been a cook
A real live lover, could have been a book
I could have been a signpost, could have been a clock
As simple as a kettle, steady as a rock
“This is beautiful,” she hummed. “Classic, and classy. I love this.”
“Thank you.”
“I can’t believe no one has made a video for it yet.”
“Wullll... it’s complicated when a song has lyrics like these. It lists real objects. Signpost and rocks and stuff.”
“So what? Show a signpost, and then show a rock.”
“But that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?”
Anna Marie Moon pressed a finger to her lip. “Agree. Where’s the mystery? The heart?”
“Yeah. The trick... I think... is to try and find something deeper within the song, and show that. Something that resonates with the intent—not just the literal words.”
“The vibe. I love it. Gotta get the vibe.” She kept her eyes closed, mouthing along to the lyrics as if she knew them. “It’s a bittersweet song. Like regret. Like, maybe if things were different...”
I nodded. She seemed to understand. It was dark out, and the orange lights speckling the squat buildings turned everyone into colorful shadows. No one paid attention to us, but there was life all around. Chirping bugs, drunk-and-high laughter, the shuffling of bags, the crackling of beachside fires.
“See that guy over there?” Anna Marie Moon nodded in the direction of a middle-aged man. Typically, it was seen as awkward for a man his age to be at a hostel, especially in a hip surfer town. He sat alone, reading a book by phone light. “This guy knows all about regrets. He wasted his whole career on some mythical bird.”
“Mythical? Like... Bigfoot?”
“Yeah. The bird he’s been looking for doesn’t exist.”
“Is it supposed to be a Costa Rican bird?”
“No, it’s North American. But it doesn’t exist! So he’s here, with us. Lost. Escaping. Giving up.” She winked, a crescent moon. “It’s okay to regret things, Thal.”
I could feel myself blushing. It was as if Anna Marie Moon could see right through me. But, I was still confused about something.
“How did you guess my name was... Thalita?”
“Easy. It’s one of my gifts. I’m good with names. See her, at the kitchen bar?” She pointed.
“Meadow, right?”
“Yeah, Meadow. Her real name is Jennifer.” She giggled. “And the girl beside her? She calls herself Opal. Her real name is Ashley. And that one,” Anna Marie Moon’s bracelets jingled as her arm shot out, “the one coming in? She got here yesterday. Jade. Although her real name’s Miranda.”
“Does everyone have a pseudonym?”
“Just the women. It’s something you see when ladies like us travel. We need to reinvent ourselves, become closer to nature. The dudes usually keep their original names, though. No imagination.”
“Oh... cool,” I said, adjusting my glasses. “And your name? Anna Marie Moon?”
“You guessed it. I made it up.” She blew a lock of dark hair out of her vision. “I felt like my name was a bit too evocative of fairy magic or something. So I added the Anna Marie.”
I stared blankly.
She gave me her crescent wink.
We both started laughing.
I’ve scrubbed through the hundreds of hours of footage of Anna Marie Moon, taking notes of conversations, actions, locations. So far, I’ve noted at least fifty-five winks in my direction. Fifty. Five. To this day, I can’t tell you what they mean. Is it irony? Is she letting me in on the joke? Is there a secret being revealed? Or hidden? Even listening back to the audio, I can’t piece it together. The only conclusion I would wager on is that her soft, measured, brown-eyed wink is meant to charm me into compliance. And it works.
************
The next day, I became Anna Marie Moon’s documentarian.
“Hello. I’m Anna Marie Moon, and I’m going to tell your future.”
We had carved out an hour after breakfast to film her introduction. She adjusted her top, fluffed her dark waves, and knocked her lines out in less than ten minutes. She took to stardom like a fish takes to water—a natural camera presence at every angle, every locale. She was capable of feigning obliviousness to the filming process, then, when it became necessary, hamming it up like a theater performer.
We wandered the beach. She brought along a device to aid her divination process. “It’s like a cup,” she told the camera. “When I give a fortune, I’m splashing water everywhere. You get wet, then eventually dry off without drinking it in. Once you're dry, you forget the whole conversation. But this ticket,” she waved a small piece of paper near the lens, “is your cup. It makes it so the water isn’t too tough to swallow. I’ll show you.”
In this part of the film, we plod through the sand, stopping every few feet to ask a stranger if they would like a custom-made, one hundred percent authentic prediction. It’s a slow start. Anna Marie Moon offers her prediction tickets cheap at first, and then free. We mostly get waved away. I edit out these initial failures. Cut them from reality. The successful interaction is the one I keep.
The camera zooms in on Anna Marie Moon’s hands. She’s pulling a strip from her device. The device isn’t much different than a ticket dispenser except that it has a rubber wheel that stamps the stubs as they come out. In her field, they don’t call it a ticket dispenser, they call it an Elemessen™ Pro—a marketing portmanteau between “elemental” and “essence.” They were a fad in the late ‘90s, then forgotten. Anna deftly sidesteps the Elemessen™ history and calls hers a Fae Kit. It has seashells and glitter glued on all sides. She holds it like a precious porcelain doll, talks about it like a friend.
As she withdraws a ticket, the colored paper tenderly pinched between light-blue fingernails, I get the impression that she’s stroking a braid of hair. The fluidity of her wrist, the softened skin. All the while, she never breaks eye contact with her patron—never once. An eyebrow lifts, and the corner of her mouth becomes sharper. The tip of her tongue wets her upper lip, almost invisibly. Most people wouldn’t notice it, but I’ve watched these bits of footage a hundred times now, zoomed in close to her grainy image. Slow motion. Color corrected. I can see the bite marks on her nails, see they are painted but unwashed. I can see the moment, in the exact frame, when the rubber stamping mechanism clicks, releasing resistance on the ticket. The folds on the knuckle of her thumb. The stray eyelash on her sandy cheek. That soft, glimmering upper lip. All of this to show, on record, that there is no sleight of hand, no ruse.
The first time I saw her do this was only the night before. Our conversation lasted long into the night. She said she knew I was coming, that we were going to work together. She had seen it. After hearing my story about working on Wild Boars, she knew why we were destined to work together. She would show off her gift, and I would document it.
She gave me a fortune ticket. The ticket had a moon on it, embedded in the paper itself. The rubber stamping mechanism, which had twelve different images on rotation, inked a simple mermaid silhouette over the moon. This combination, Anna Marie Moon said, was the cup from which her fortune should be drunk.
“However,” she said, “I know you’re a skeptic. I can feel it in you. That’s why I’m not going to tell you the fortune. Not yet. Film me. Let me prove what I can do. And once you’ve seen enough to be convinced, I’ll know that you believe me.”
“How will you know?”
“Because... I’ll feel it. You’ll do exactly what I predict. And then you’ll say to yourself, ‘I don’t know where you are, Anna Marie Moon, but you were right about everything.’ And when that happens, I’ll just know.” She gave her crescent wink.
In the video, she has successfully given her first fortunes to a mother and daughter duo. They are both delighted by their tickets. The mother got a clover ticket with a sun stamp, and the daughter got a wave design with a circumpunct.
“These ladies are ready to go forward into their future,” Anna Marie Moon says directly to the camera. The three of them hug and bounce. I scrub forward until I hear my own voice. The camera tilts down as I approach Anna Marie Moon.
“Okay, so... now that I have footage of a prediction, how am I supposed to... confirm it?”
“You gotta keep watching, Thal.”
“For how long?”
“Until the future!”
“But what if we never see any results?”
Anna Marie Moon’s feet turn away from the camera. A puff of sand is kicked up as she goes. She hasn’t said anything, and yet I get right back to work filming her, tagging along like a puppy out of breath.
I edit this part out.
************
“I’m sorry,” the waitress said. “We don’t split the bill here.”
A new wave of transients had arrived at the hostel. Like many of the ones before, they were all pretending not to have rich parents. It was a trait I had come to expect and secretly loathe. The men, especially, liked to look as if they didn’t have a penny to their names, yet bragged about how their lawyer fathers or entrepreneur mothers could easily buy one of these cheap plots of land and start their own lucrative business selling board shorts and boba tea. These same men would only ever open their wallets when they got in trouble and needed to quickly fly out of the country.
Despite these penny-pinching tendencies, six of us—me, Anna Marie Moon, James, Brian, Coral (real name Jessica), and Sapphire (real name also Jessica)—had decided to eat out at an expensive diner. It was a beautiful, warm Halloween afternoon. Even though Halloween wasn’t celebrated in Costa Rica, we all felt it was at least worth a nice lunch in Limón.
“Who got the burger?”
“Not me,” said Anna Marie Moon. “I’m a pescatarian today.”
“Can’t we just split it evenly? Like civilized creatures?”
“They even take real dollars?”
“I’ll pay for it all now,” Sapphire said. “Y’all pay me back in cash when we get back to the hostel.”
James scratched his bare chin. “How much each?”
“Whatever 144 divided by six is.”
“Twenty-eight eighty,” Anna Marie Moon said without hesitation. James and Sapphire both pulled out their phones to do the calculations.
Anna Marie Moon nudged me with her elbow, then nodded toward my camera case, a black bag with the word “Thalita” spelled out in small gray cursive. She had done this before. She wanted me to start recording without making a big deal out of it.
James started chuckling. “Nice try, Moon. It’s only twenty-four.”
“Close enough,” she said, giving me the wink. “I’ve never been a math girl.”
James waved for the waitress to come over, then handed the bill to Sapphire. “Why’s your friend recording?” He nodded at me just as I turned the camera on.
“She’s my documentarian. She’s going to film me giving you all your fortunes today.”
Everyone laughed, clearly thinking it was a joke. Anna Marie Moon laughed along, not an ounce of confidence lost. My camera was rolling, and it was a delight. I had a perfect angle, scooting my chair backward to disappear. The mid-day sun accented Anna Marie Moon’s bronze skin and toned arms. She commandeered their joviality, drowning them in her liquid charisma.
As I rewatch this scene, it’s clear the power she has over the people around her. Whatever skepticism the group has at first quickly dissolves into friendly joking, then compliance, then full-on willingness. Zoom, pan. One by one she eases out tickets from her sparkling Fae Kit, each accompanied by a gentle prediction of the future. Sapphire will soon form a stronger connection with her estranged mother. Coral will keep traveling for two months longer than she had planned. Brian will lose something important, then find it again on a bright day. Only James doesn’t play along completely. His body language is stiff, his arms folded. I can see, now, with further scrutiny, the way his eyes seem to roll after every prediction. When he finally accepts his ticket, he does so with few words, slipping beneath his used napkins when he thinks no one is looking. The others marvel over their tickets, comparing them, deciphering how they might play out, cupping them in their hands like living animals.
By the end, Sapphire, Carol, and Brian are so grateful for their fortunes they convince James that they should all pay for Anna Marie Moon’s meal. James reluctantly agrees. She waves them off, but they insist. No one asks me if I wanted to pay extra for Anna Marie Moon, but of course I don't say anything. I’m a fly on the wall. Plus, at this point in our friendship, I was buying most of her meals anyway.
As we left the restaurant, I stayed in full filming mode. I covered angles, picked up stray bits of conversation, tried to remain invisible. I kept recording all the way back to the hostel. Music played, people danced. Even I danced a little, not sure why. I can’t dance. I hate dancing. I skip over this part of the footage.
Anna Marie Moon didn’t talk to me for the rest of the night. Instead, she was stuck to James like glue. Her lithe hands, colored nails, spidered along his back. She laughed softly in his ear. They swayed together with the tinny beat of the music. Eventually, they disappeared together. I couldn’t understand it. It seemed that the less a person took her seriously, the more she threw herself at them. I turned the camera off.
Sapphire pulled me aside.
“Hey, I’m just—sorry, yer name is Thalita, right?”
“Sure.”
“Just tryin’ to collect mah money before everyone gets too wasted and forgets,” she said with a fake smile. “Y’know how it is. Everyone promises to pay ya back, and then ya never see ‘em again.”
“No, I get it. How much do I owe?”
“Well, it was 144 bucks. Since we’re covering Moon now, we have to split it by five. Sooo... about twenty-eight eighty?”
************
Every day we passed by several buildings on our way down the strip. Most of the buildings were for leisure and commerce, featuring sandy exteriors with stand-up countertops made of wooden surfboards, canopies stitched with sun-blonde palm leaves, driftwood balusters and bamboo posts. People from all over the world relaxed in plastic chairs drinking “cerveza Imperial” and brushing the sand from their calves before applying sun lotion. Most of the walls and tables and wooden benches were brightly painted. Oranges, teals, canary yellows, a splash of pink, a red frame, a green shutter. It looked as if all of the unused paint of the world had been sent here for a second chance at life.
One of the buildings had an upstairs area called El Lagarto de Hielo. Most people called it the Lagarto. We never went in. An older woman—in her fifties, but still fit and naturally graceful—would smile at the boys who went by, coaxing them up with friendly flirts and offers of better-priced beer. Rumor was that if she liked you enough, she’d read your palm or divine your future from tarot cards. Everyone assumed that she and Anna Marie Moon knew each other well, but they paid no more attention to each other than to the wind.
I only knew one person who had gone upstairs with the Lagarto woman. I shared a mixed dorm with six strangers. Keith was in his mid-thirties. This was his fourth time in Costa Rica. He said that he never did drugs, but when in Puerto Viejo, the cocaine was too pure to pass up. He politely asked if I minded, and when I said I didn’t, he laid a line on a Frisbee, snorted it up like a pig, and went “hooooo ahhhhh!” He told me that Val Pera, the woman from Lagarto, was the real deal. Her Instagram account had over 100k followers.
Certified Psychic Medium, Grief Counselor, & Reiki Healer.
Shamanic Healing from the Beautiful Beaches of Costa Rica.
I told Anna Marie Moon about her. She agreed that it was probably smart to start an Instagram. We would need more pictures to gain a presence, and a good description. I set up an account and gave her the password, then added a picture from my camera roll. It was a picture of Anna Marie Moon pretending a coconut was her client, daintily handing it a ticket from her Fae Kit. We both laughed.
“We don’t want to sound too official,” Anna Marie Moon said. “Certified this and that just turns people away. Too fake. People need to feel comfortable. It’s a spiritual connection, not a research project.” We settled on something simple:
The Seafoam Psychic
Real Fortunes from a Real Human <3
************
One evening during filming, Anna Marie Moon had entranced a young Japanese couple near the Lagarta. Val Pera glided over and watched disapprovingly. Before the couple could leave, Val offered them a table upstairs. They nodded in excitement, not fully understanding what they were being offered, but overjoyed by the hospitality they were being shown.
When the Japanese couple ascended the stairs, Val placed her sun-weathered hand on Anna Marie Moon’s thin shoulder. “We all love our Moon. She’s so fresh. And good for a show, isn’t she?” Val Pera addressed the camera, ignoring Anna Marie Moon’s gaze completely. “After thirty years in my profession, I couldn’t be more glad to see young people taking an interest in the spiritual arts. However, I can’t, in good conscience, endorse this girl’s journey. I just don’t sense the gift in her.”
Anna Marie Moon, without hesitation, placed her hand on top of Val Pera’s, looking up at her with adoration. They had the air of a family, a grandmother and granddaughter bonding. “I know you’ve never sensed the gift in me.” She gave Val Pera a light kiss on the cheek. “It’s okay. Your powers are just... fading in old age.”
At this, Val Pera broke away, rapidly spitting Spanish, her arms flinging around as if she were trying to catch a slippery fish. Anna Marie Moon responded in small agreements, also in Spanish, until finally removing the Fae Kit from her fanny pack and telling the camera, “She’s begging me for a fortune, the sweet old thing.”
Val Pera turned to me—not to the camera, but to me, specifically. “Listen closely,” she said. “You have been wasting your time. You will find soon that all of your faith in this girl has been for nothing. Give up!”
Anna Marie Moon carried on with her evening as if nothing had happened. I followed dutifully, silently.
From the footage, it seems as if she’s oblivious to Val Pera’s anger—or, if not oblivious, too worry-free to have been affected in any way. She smiles, chats with travelers, eases out fortune tickets, and gracefully accepts their money. What the camera doesn’t catch is a new pattern that shapes out over the passing weeks.
Sometimes, Anna Marie Moon would point her patrons towards the Lagarto using vague imagery and directions. She’d talk about the “wise woman” in the area, or good luck with lizards and ice. Instead of avoiding El Lagarto de Hielo, we’d pass by more often, Anna Marie Moon waving hello or dishing out a syrupy compliment in Spanish, a full, friendly smile. Somehow, this worked.
Before I knew it, Val Pera was smiling back.
************
What I hate about the next file of footage is James. He’s a different man.
After the night he and Anna Marie Moon left in each other’s arms, he became more supportive. His skepticism evaporated. In fact, he becomes a “character” for the next twelve recorded hours. I go mad trying to cut him out.
As we patrolled the beach for clients, he jumped around, waving his arms. He called himself her hype man. “She’s so famous,” he’d say. “Look, they’re even recording her for TV!”
At one point I couldn’t take it any more. I made up an excuse and went back to the hostel. I wasn’t feeling like myself. Plus, I was starting to lose faith. We had been filming every day. Every day, she made at least one—if not ten—predictions. I had more predictions on record than I knew what to do with. But we had yet to get a solid follow-up. A conclusion. A success. At least while working on Wild Boars, I knew we would always catch the hog. With Anna Marie Moon, I had no idea what we would catch.
It was only noon, but I ordered a vodka tonic from the bar in the hostel’s community area. I started questioning myself—a familiar whirlpool that shipwrecks my liver. “I’m not even a documentarian,” I murmured to my cocktail. “What am I doing? Why am I doing? I can’t just—”
I ordered another drink. Was I just Anna Marie Moon’s little tail, following her around the shoreline?
The middle-aged man was looking at me. The one Anna Marie Moon had said was chasing after a mythical bird. He had stuck around, weeks later, every day sitting alone with a book. I noticed a familiar slip of paper. His bookmark. It was one of Anna Marie Moon’s tickets. I downed my drink and turned on my camera.
“She gave this to me about a month ago,” the man said with a ragged smile. His ticket had a hawk with a pine-tree stamp. “Cute young thing, isn’t she? So full of energy. I wish I had that energy.”
“Do you mind if I ask what your fortune was?”
“What’s your name, hun?”
“Wulll... call me Thalita.”
“Like the camera brand?”
I nodded.
“Hm. It was to the effect of, ‘don’t worry, your dreams will come back to life.’” He let out something between a laugh and a sigh. “Trite, I have to say. My dreams are dead and buried.”
“What do you mean?”
“What all have you heard?”
I wasn’t sure how to broach the subject of his “mythical” creature without sounding condescending. I paused, cleared my throat. “I heard you specialize in birds... that don’t exist?”
He sighed again, this time pure fatigue. “Yep. I have a PhD in ornithology. Spent my whole life studying this one particular bird. Sure, we aren’t always this specialized in my field, but we do tend to have our favorite orders. Casuariiformes. Passerines. Galliformes. For me, piciformes. Woodpeckers. Specifically, the shell-billed woodpecker of North America.”
He went on to explain how he had spent his whole life working towards studying and conserving this woodpecker. Then, when he had finished his education and become an international scholar on the shell-bill, it went extinct. All of its natural woodland had been destroyed. The last known population disappeared.
“I feel... deeply sorry about the loss of this beautiful species. Selfishly, I also feel lost, as a person. Like a part of my life has up and vanished. I doomed myself, I guess. I could have been anything, and I chose this.”
I didn’t know what to say. A salty wave of bile crashes and breaks within my stomach. My fingers trembled, yet I managed to keep the camera straight.
“I miss the music,” he said after a long pause.
“I didn’t realize woodpeckers made music.”
“Oh, sure, they aren’t songbirds. But the way they drum at the trees? Peck, peck, peck...” as he said this, he tapped his index finger against the bench. “It’s a sort of drum rhythm, isn’t it? I have a million recordings of it. Billions of hours of footage. But recordings aren’t the same thing. When I walk into the woods, I can never hear exactly that song again.”
************
I remember having a vivid dream about Anna Marie Moon singing, only to be woken up by police sirens.
There were a few days where I couldn’t follow Ana Marie Moon. No one knew where she had gone. It was during these few days that my self-loathing and regret churned the rude sea inside me, making me itch. I spent most of the daylight hours sweating in bed. At night, I moved to the community area, hidden in a corner on my phone. I took Keith up on his offer of a line of coke. I was drunk, and it seemed like a good time to try something new and dangerous. I sneezed, blasted powder all over his blanket. I got so embarrassed that I ran out to the night stalls, awkwardly hunting for fresh cocaine to pay him back.
I found Anna Marie Moon sharing a joint with a group of musicians. Instead of sleeping at the hostel, where the owners always had a free bed waiting for her, she had been couch hopping.
“I changed my routine... to avoid James.”
James had quickly gotten clingy, she told me later. He would hover around, getting jealous when she talked to other men. He finally got the hint and continued south to Bocas del Toro. I asked if he went with Brian, his friend. She avoided giving further details. “If anyone asks, we didn’t know him that well, okay?”
Anna Marie Moon seemed off. She smiled and laughed like usual, but there was an edge to every sentence. Her hair, usually afloat in the day’s sun, drooped like kelp, weighed down with humidity. She told me that she needed a temporary hiatus from being filmed. I pretended that was fine. I didn’t want to look clingy.
I talked to the ornithologist again, but he didn’t seem all that interested in my company. I decided to busy myself by searching for other past clients. The hostel owner. The local bakers. The avocado carts. The surfer bums. Even some of the teenage cocaine dealers. Most of them said the same things about dreams, hopes, unrealized gains and losses. “We don’t take the gringa seriously,” one man said, carefully tucking his fortune ticket back into his wallet.
With tourism season coming closer, regulars set up shops in pre-made stands along the beach, typically selling handmade bracelets, necklaces, rings, and other flashy trinkets. Even the shirts were pressed by hand, offering simple tri-tone images of sunsets or nonsense phrases like “Fish and Music Both Have Scales.”
The people who ran the stands welcomed Anna Marie Moon. Potential patrons lingered among the wares while she flirted and giggled and eased out fortune tickets from the bedazzled Fae Kit. The stand workers would often share their marijuana and fresh fruit. She had become a celebrity in the drifter circuit. Not only was she making a little extra money, but the locals seemed to approve of her.
I lingered further away, half-pretending not to film. The audio turned out muddy. Indecipherable. I felt like a phantom, more than ever. I felt like I did in the northern woods of Texas, hunting a hog I knew wasn’t real. But I did manage to get candid clips of Anna Marie Moon. Stretching, swimming in the ocean, flexing. The way she moved her fingers as she talked. The way she shook the sand from her hair. The way she tightened the emerald cloth around her waist.
The sirens that awoke me from my dream turned out to be the police. After they left, I was able to turn on my camera.
James had drowned before reaching Panama.
He had disappeared on December 1st. His travel companion, Brian, had contacted the Costa Rican authorities and the US embassy a day later. On December 22nd, local authorities found James’ body floating in the ocean, bashed against the rocks of Salsa Brava.
As I piece together this part of the footage, I have to be careful. There is a moment after the police leave—when I start filming—where Anna Marie Moon looks... different. For all the time that I knew her, she could always be called a happy person. Enthusiastic, even. But, looking now, frame by frame, this is the only time she’s ever radiated. She’s glowing.
Blink and you miss it. Skip ahead a few seconds, and you miss it.
She becomes somber, serious. She tells the camera that the police were just following up on his last weeks, to see if there was anything they needed to know about why it happened. Whether it was an accident, or on purpose, they wouldn’t say. Had someone driven him to this fate?
“We didn’t know him that well, really. More importantly,” she says sagaciously, a blue-tipped finger on her lower lip, “imagine how poor Brian feels. He lost his best friend, and then had to find him again. On such a bright, beautiful day, no less.”
I inch back to the beginning of this scene and erase all of the glow.
************
I’m still reducing, reducing. Cut, splice, merge, paste. There’s only one piece of footage I’ve been putting off.
The night I danced makes me cringe. Whereas Anna Marie Moon is a flexible, fit, sun-tanned beauty, I’m a baked potato in sweatpants. I’m pale, sweaty. I move like a rubber tire tossed down the stairs. Every time I see myself stepping into frame, I skip ahead an hour.
But this is the only footage I have of Anna Marie Moon dancing, and I feel like it belongs somewhere. She always dances, in a way. That’s the way her body works. But to see her actually dance is something else, something just as magical.
I press play, lean back. The urge comes upon me to skip ahead, but I don’t. I sit on my hands to prevent myself from interfering. Ten minutes, then twenty. At some point, Anna Marie Moon starts dancing with James, and I know where this is going but keep watching. On the screen, I dance more purposefully, crooked gyrations, my head down as if I’m trying not to notice anyone else in the world. Then, I run to the bathroom.
I’m only gone for a minute. The rest of the party keeps playing on my computer, unphased by my absence. I remember it happening, but I’m trying not to think about it. I’m finally out of frame for the moment, so I can pay attention to Anna Marie Moon. James is also there, but as much as I don’t like him, I also remember that he died shortly after this. I feel bad for all of the scenes I cut him from... but not enough to put him back. Even with James there, this might be the piece of that night’s dancing I can actually use—Anna Marie Moon swimming to the music without me anywhere in sight.
But then, something unexpected. Anna Marie Moon looks around, seeking someone. Then, she sees my camera. She dances close, leans down, her oval face in center, her smile wide, a little drunk, a little high. She says, “Thal, in case I have to disappear, here’s your fortune! You won’t give up. You’ll keep following your dreams, even if it seems like you missed your chance. You will persevere! I see it in your future. The moon on your ticket represents the lens of your camera, watching from the distance. That’s you! Don’t regret your choices. If you believe in something hard enough, everyone else will have to believe you as well.” She winks. “You could have been anything else first, but I’m glad you weren’t. You are you! You are Thalita!”
My mouth is open. A tear struggles to escape my left eye. I don’t know what I should feel.
I’m touched. Her words of support mean the world to me. Her reference to the Nick Drake song shows that she paid attention to what I told her. I feel seen.
And yet, I also feel invisible. I understand what she means about me being the lens from afar, the silent camera. It’s a lonely life being a watcher, never interacting. But that’s not the thing that makes me feel invisible. She called me Thalita. That’s the brand of my equipment, written clearly on my camera bag. That’s why she called me that. It had been her mistake from the beginning, a cheap guess.
We had known each other for three months, and she never learned my real name.
************
The last time I saw Anna Marie Moon, she was giving a fortune to a bus driver for a free ride. She stood half a step on, half a step off. Her emerald cloth was wrapped tight around her hips and legs. Her silver waist chain twinkled. She flirted with the driver in perfect, watery Spanish, as effortlessly as anything else she did.
“Don’t worry, Thal. Just going back to San José for a few days, but we’ll keep filming when I get back!” And then she winked for the last time. “Leave that camera rolling, hun.”
I’m watching her wink now, over and over, backwards and forwards. There’s still no clear sign what this wink means. Did she know she would never come back? Did she know she would never see me again? Was this her way of saying goodbye? I have no idea what happened to her.
I stayed at the hostel two weeks longer. I didn’t film anything during that time. The only other person I talked to was the ornithologist, and only twice. Eventually, my visa neared expiration and I had no choice but to make my way home.
When I got back to California, I went on a week-long internet search to find her. Where was she from? Where does she go when she’s not traveling? Did the police catch her? Did she escape?
There was only one trace of her online, and it was the Instagram account we had made. It had somehow amassed 12,785 followers, despite only a brief description and a single photo of her and a coconut. That one photo, however, had over two hundred comments thanking her for her predictions, recommending her to others. There were recollections of how she had correctly detected illnesses, or saved people from romantic mistakes, or reconnected lost loved ones.
I recognized some of the profiles, and spent the next few hours cross-referencing images with people I had recorded. Many of the comments, of course, were surfer bros calling Anna Marie Moon a hot, but I could recognize many of the people she had affected. Coral and Sapphire were among the many who were grateful. The ornithologist thanked her for giving him hope, saying he was searching for his bird in Cuba. Brian, bafflingly, only left a skull emoji. Even Val Pera had written something: “She has the gift!”
But Anna Marie Moon hadn’t responded to any of these comments. Not a single interaction. She hadn’t even logged in, despite also having the account’s username and password. Another loose end. Gone, without a trace—a creature that doesn’t exist.
The most recent comment on her photo said, simply, “Why did you disappear?” No emojis, no hashtags.
It was from me.
************
Everything I can prove about Anna Marie Moon’s powers of foresight is currently being reduced into four minutes and fifty-eight seconds of sight and sound.
It took months before I got the courage to open my editing software. There were hundreds of hours to pour through. The idea of watching it all, cutting it down, organizing it—it filled me with dread. But it was everything. After six long years of college, all I had were these skills. And after three long months with Anna Marie Moon, all I had was this footage. I couldn’t give it all up.
And now, it’s done. Anna Marie Moon, an undulating song incarnate, a mythical sea entity, a poem that exists only in memory and recordings. I’ve painted a picture of a woman with magical powers. She floats like Walken, “Thriller”-dances like Madonna. All of what makes her wonderful flickers and glows seafoam blue from my monitor. Everything else has been cut out.
I take one last look at the ribbons of video in my editing software. I mute the volume. Then I turn the music track to one hundred percent, a flac file of “One of These Things First” by Nick Drake. I export it. When it’s done, I log into her Instagram and upload it.
I feel a soft harmony in my sternum, a sense of wholeness. I watch and rewatch, uncertain if she is elevating the music or if she is the music. The views and Likes and comments flood in. The rude sea inside me grows civil at her song.
I don’t know where you are, Anna Marie Moon, but you were right about everything.
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Image by me
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