Face

by Aimee Liu

  “Bai xiangku.” White witch.

  That’s when I felt Johnny reaching down, offering his hand. To lift me? Or push me?

  Up and over the wall, Maibelle. You can fly. You’ve done it before. Just look at me. I flew and I escaped!

  They didn’t expect me to go that way, and I almost made it, had one leg over. Fabric ripping. No fire escape. Five flights. Then a car below sounded its horn, and I looked. The street swam at me like a drop of pond life I was examining under a microscope. Infinitesimally close and utterly removed. I would never get there.

  That instant of doubt gave them all the time they needed to yank me back.

  “Don’t be stupid.” Mike’s voice in the darkness. Mike, my friend. “We’re just having fun, you know?” Two of them held me. I felt the blade’s point on the nipple of my right breast. “Got it?”

  I must have nodded. They pulled me away from the edge, and back downstairs, wrapped plastic bags around my hands and feet, around my mouth to replace the soaked rag. One of them kept flicking matches in my eyes, singed my hair with cigarettes. The smell, familiar and awful, and then from outside came the roar and clatter of firecrackers in the street. And I remembered being trapped and terrified. My father’s death-mask face. But my mother had rescued me. My family had rescued me.

  They were playing a game. Throwing fingers and fists. I watched them to avoid the flame. Boys. The kind of boys my brother had looked up to. The light moved and color broke from the wall behind them. Again, it flashed. Small flecks of color and shine, I now saw, covered a board leaning against the mantel. Iridescent wings. Not butterflies. They were transparent, visible only when the light hit them. Dragonflies. With their wings pinned. Dead.

  Paper. Rock. Scissors. They were playing for a reward. The knife in the center of the circle.

  I could feel the worms already crawling from my skin. I could see forward and backward in time, could move in and out of my body and its pain. My senses were warped by madness, which perhaps explains why one arm of my mind stretched beyond it all, untouchable. This dreaming arm reversed everything. Glabber, the basement demon, the pieces of nightmare bodies in the street, they were here in this room, no less real than the singed hair or cigarette. I was the one no longer real. I was dead or haunted or insane. If they were going to kill me, they would kill a crazy person.

  I stared into the flame the fat one kept waving at me. I didn’t blink. Again and again, until the muscles around my eyes burned with the effort of keeping them wide. My body rigid. The effort kept me from thinking or feeling anything else. And I counted. Slowly. From zero to forty, to seventy-six. Watching the numbers swallow time.

  Even when the door opened and an overhead light momentarily blinded us all, I kept count. A new voice barked at the others. A familiar voice, low and smooth. Tommy Wah! Lost in the crystalline madness, I actually believed he had come to rescue me. Still, I didn’t look or move. I reached two hundred.

  He entered my field of vision, tall as Tommy, dark, but older, better dressed. He looked familiar. Felt familiar.

  I had never seen him before.

  I retreated back into my crazy eyes, let the numbers fill my face, mend my body, stop its shaking. They seemed my only defense. Aside from dying.

  He walked over and peered at me. He still looked like Tommy. He did, and the comparison threatened to make me lose count. But he wasn’t paying attention, anyway. He stood away from me as if the fluids that soaked my clothing, skin, and hair might contaminate his gabardine trousers. He wrinkled his nose at my smell and shook his head, fired an angry tirade at the boys.

  Three hundred ten.

  The man kicked out everybody but Mike and the match man. Then he squatted next to me. He wore penny loafers. Shiny. With Chinese coins in the penny holders. Chinese coins. Anna had a Chinese coin like that. And suddenly I couldn’t remember what number I’d reached.

  I stared at his shoes so I wouldn’t have to look at his face, so like Tommy’s, hear his voice. If I stared hard enough, I could transform them; when I followed the legs up to his waist, his chest, his face, it would be Tommy, years later. He would take my hand, swing arms, and walk me safely uptown.

  But I couldn’t stare down the words.

  “I know who you are. You don’t move. Don’t scream. Understand?”

  The crazy act wasn’t fooling anybody. I nodded. They made me squat, shoved me into a garbage bag that was slimy and stank of the fishmonger’s trash they must have emptied out of it.

  Would they bother to threaten me if they were going to kill me? The rest of it—the pain and filth, my revulsion and panic—all paled beside this single shaft of hope.

  They weren’t going to use that blade on me. Not yet.

  But I’d already been cut too deeply.

  Tear the scab away and a hole remains, deeper than you could ever imagine. Like a swimming hole without a bottom. Like a well without a top.

  I ride the elevator up twelve stories and bang on a door smeared with greens and blues. Water, I think, still pounding until the sleeping blond man awakes.

  The door opens and I throw myself on Jed Moffitt with kisses for his blue eyes, hugs for his thin ribs, fingers swimming through his long pale hair.

  “Maibelle!”

  “No. Don’t say anything.”

  I push him backward into his darkened hallway. With the door closed, the surging, gurgling colors rise and fall like supernatural pets. The place is a wonderland of liquid color and light.

  I knead him, smooth him. He doesn’t resist. He is tall, golden. I play blind, moving my palms over the lines of his face, closing my eyes and making my own dream picture. He wears only a T-shirt and shorts. His skin’s cold as marble, but his hands move quickly, responding with grabs and tugs. He strips me, then himself, falls on me stroking.

  I want him to numb me, let me believe. I want him to turn into Johnny and take me away, back before. To not have to remember or forget. This stranger to become a friend, a lover, to render me capable of love and forgiveness. To force me to trust him.

  But his nails scrape my skin like the tips of forceps shocking with each touch. And instead of numbing the surfaces, welding them, the jabs just keep sharpening. Now his arms and legs become whips, flicking lightly, then harder, piercing.

  Not Johnny.

  Jed moans, exhausted and thrilled. I roll away in disgust, feel the sneer before I hear it.

  Chinaman’s whore.

  At the end of the darkened hallway outside Jed’s apartment a window stands low to the floor. It is crusted with soot. The frame is blistered and cracked, the lock broken, catch missing. I don’t look past the filthy glass, but I feel the cold air splashing through a bullet-sized hole with cracks fingering out in a web. Where this air comes from you can either float or sink.

  The sill hits my knees. The panes climb nearly to the ceiling, each sash the size of a steamer trunk. The grinding vibrates down the hall, and I worry someone might wake. Another shove, though, and it’s open.

  No moon tonight. Just blackened rooftops and the pinked blur of streetlights below. Spidery limbs of leafless trees in Sheridan Square. Twelve stories down. No spinning. No blur. No dizzying outward mental plunge. Just the perfect, unbearable clarity of this empty patch of air. My heels kick against the granite fall. My hands clasp the sill. Straight down. No fire escape. No moon tonight. No witness.

  I tip forward, back. A human seesaw. Unclasp my hands and reach into space, grabbing the steam that spurts from my mouth, steam that hangs weightless from invisible threads. No thought.

  I touch the child’s golden heart that still, belatedly, hangs at my throat. The only reply is the tug of air. No comforting voices. No Marge or Johnny. No White Witch or Tai. I’m on my own here. They want no part of this.

  The low moan of a pump nearly unseats me. A road crew. Pale helmets like snails crawling up out of manholes. I can’t see bodies or faces, just the glow of lanterns, black holes in the ground.

  An inch forward, a
nd the balance tips. Gravity will handle the rest. They don’t notice me, those men. I am no one to them. Nothing but soiled shards of bone and bent pieces. A shattered lens on the earth’s smooth, unyielding face.

  Just another fallen object.

  19

  It was nearly dawn when I returned to Eleventh Street. I needed a shower. To rinse and sponge and soap away the filth, the stench of fish and beer that still clung to me. To scrape my skin free of the memory I’d finally retrieved and now longed desperately to abandon. In the end I had neither jumped nor fallen nor flown from the window outside Jed Moffitt’s, but even with my feet flat on the ground the distance below seemed endless.

  There was music softly playing inside my darkened apartment and perfume in the air. Wine. Gardenias. Otis Redding.

  I leaned into the door, all the breath gone out of me. I wailed something unintelligible and dented the refrigerator with my fist.

  My brother appeared through the darkness, ghosted in a sheet. ’That you, Maibelle?”

  “Henry…” It was all I could manage. The night had been too long and too wide, and now, suddenly, I was drowning.

  “Hey, Maibee.” He stepped forward and held me. “We all knew it was coming. God, I feel terrible not being there. That’s okay, go ahead and cry.”

  “Knew what?”

  He became very still.

  “About Dad?”

  I was talking into his shoulder, but couldn’t bear to pull back.

  “What about Dad?”

  “Isn’t that why you’re upset? It’s all over?”

  I began to breathe. And choked. It was the closest thing to a laugh I could produce. Not that laughter would have been any more appropriate.

  “No, that’s not it. Henry, no. Don’t let go. I can’t tell you what’s happened. But I’m so tired. Please, just let me lie down next to you for a while. Maybe then I could sleep.”

  “Hey, Maibee.” He kissed my forehead, but his mouth was hard and nervous. “Maybe you should tell me what’s going on.”

  He pulled back, and I was suddenly aware of the darkness turning. A bird trilled outside. Through the pale tissue of light I saw the muted squares that I knew were Marge’s photographs against the far wall, the slumbering form of her couch, the blackened entrance to her darkroom. I felt the White Witch and her children warning me not to stay.

  “Henri?”

  Only then did I realize we weren’t alone. Coralie huddled in the bedroom doorway, in my brother’s shirt.

  “It’s all right. My sister.”

  I grabbed his hand as he made a start back to her. “Both of you, then. Please, Henry. Let me sleep with you—or get out!”

  “Yes, all right.” She took my other hand and led me forward. There were no more questions, no need for answers. They opened a safety zone and I crawled in just as I had when I was young enough to find comfort in my parents’ bed.

  But unlike those childhood nights, I did not dream of gliding through air or dodging bullets in lower Manhattan. I did not go into free fall, either.

  I awoke with a queer sense of peace, like the solitude you feel staring out over hundreds of miles of uninhabited land. A kind of peace that, in a blink, can switch to terror.

  Henry and Coralie lay still sleeping, their backs to me, their faces away from each other. More secrets they possessed. When I left the bed, they rolled naturally, fluidly together. Children yelled in the playground, and a soft, rhythmic thump of tambourines fell from the floor above. The narrow bedroom was tinted orange by sunlight working through the window sheet. Coralie’s hair fanned across the pillow, drawing Henry closer. I felt an intense spasm of love for them both for receiving me, and for letting me go unnoticed.

  Everything in the living room was as I remembered it. The White Witch and her children. Marge Gramercy’s children. My equipment. Yet it all looked foreign, the edges too sharp, shadows too dark. It was like a word I’d written thousands, millions of times turned suddenly unrecognizable.

  A ceramic mug sat amid a shelf full of gadgets. Blue-green mold covered the surface of its contents. Mold takes weeks to grow like that. Months. It must once have been coffee, but I couldn’t remember holding it, putting it down, abandoning it. It seemed important that I remember when I last noticed it, but I couldn’t. One of millions of instants that make no difference, except that without them the thread falls apart.

  I took the cup and rinsed it, watched the mold separate, the tap water push it through the holes of the drain until all trace of spoilage was gone. I paid attention as I scrubbed the bright red glaze and set the mug down on the lip of the sink. If I paid attention, I would remember. I would know that something happened to me. I would be able to explain.

  When I turned around, I noticed the Leica where I dropped it that night weeks ago, before learning my father was dying. Before I understood what I’d been chasing all these years. It sat on the windowsill facing out. If I tipped it straight down, it would frame the old lady’s garden. But what would be the point of that now?

  I put the camera to my eye and rotated slowly, reducing the room to a continuous stream of rectangular frames. My mother used to encourage me to do this as an exercise when I was new to photography. “Find odd corners,” she’d say, “shapes you haven’t noticed before.”

  There was so much I never noticed. The chip in the mantelpiece. The hairline crack running the length of the wall. Dustballs behind the backdrop paper. A web clouding the top of the curtain rod. The camera framed dirt and breakage; if I planned to stay, I would lay down my eyepiece and get to work scrubbing, dusting, sweeping. I would revel in the motions of my arms, the fresh smell of soap, and the sparkle of water on wood. I did not plan to stay, though. I wanted to be gone before Henry and Coralie woke up.

  The viewfinder caught on a pile of mail that I could not have noticed before because it had arrived during my absence. I set aside the camera and pulled from the top of the stack a large manila envelope bearing Tai’s careful block lettering, postmarked a week ago. It was overstuffed, as if booby-trapped.

  He was not there, I told myself. Whatever happened between him and Henry, he had no part in my attack. He was no more guilty than I was.

  Nevertheless, he was linked in my mind. An unwitting accomplice and now a reminder. I dreaded this package almost as much as I dreaded seeing him again.

  Fortunately the rest of the pile was tamer. An overdue check from Noble for the work I finished before Dad got sick. Some junk mail. And a message from Stein & Stein, the rental agency for my building. Harriet had finally delivered. Violation of the lease’s single-occupancy clause. One month’s notice of termination. I placed the letter in the refrigerator where Henry would see it when he poured his wake-up orange juice. The heavy white metal door shut without a sound.

  I turned back to pocket the check and for the first time sighted my portfolio. Could I really have left it out all this time? I remembered neither putting it away nor seeing it since that night Tai was here. The size of it, the blackness of its leather, seemed equally unfamiliar. I stepped closer, but the object remained alien, challenging. The binder was unnaturally heavy. The zipper stuck. In the other room bodies turned and sighed. I froze, but there was no further movement.

  Slowly, slowly, I pulled the metal tab around the corners and peeled back the covers. Not ringed pages but loose glassine envelopes. Not my photographs. Not my portfolio.

  I was stupid from the night of fear and remembering. Like a demented child faced with the simplest of puzzles, my mind snagged on the surfaces, unable to fit the underlying forms together. I knew some of these surfaces. My father’s pictures.

  They were all there, many more than the seven my mother had showed me. Shattered bodies, lost children, faces out of place and time. I came to the body sprawled on the platform of a crude wheelbarrow. A body without a head. And Halliday.

  Only the invisible presence of my father on the other side of the camera’s eye stopped me from tearing the print in half, from behe
ading the monster just as Anna did Johnny. He was dead, Dad had said, so what good would it do? Only destroy the evidence.

  Instead I turned to the next photograph and faced him again. A party. A banquet. Dad told me about these. Fifteen-course banquets and goddamn lawn parties. Kuomintang affairs. Men in Western suits. Oriental women in shiny skintight dresses and faces like pretty masks, as decorous and artificial as the dishes of elaborate, exotic food. Halliday is the only white. He holds a drink and swivels his body toward another man. Older. A thin Chinese face with knives of shadow beneath his cheekbones. Small, deeply set eyes. Black hair pomaded to one side. The two men lean toward each other as if plotting something.

  The man with Halliday is Li.

  My father had told me Li worked for Halliday, now here was the proof. Dad had seen them both together in China when he went back. What was it he said when I asked about that day in Connecticut?

  There are things you spend your whole life wanting to make right.

  I glanced up at the White Witch to get away. Away from my father’s failed memories.

  Look closer, she insisted. There’s more.

  Only then did I see him. Behind Li, hand on his arm. A younger Li. A ladies’ man. An older Tommy. Tai.

  No, impossible. This was—must have been when? Again, my brain stalled. Thirties? Forties? Before Tai was born, and yet there he was. In his teens. That same rounded forehead, flying brows. I’d seen that face before.

  The ghost-man from the cemetery. And the man with the coins in his shoes. They were all the same.

  I couldn’t look anymore. I was losing my mind. Coralie was not in the next room. These were not my father’s photographs. Just another nightmare. All of this. Another nightmare that made no sense.

  “Maibelle?” Henry’s voice stretched across my dream like a wide, slow rubber band.

  At the last possible moment I grabbed Tai’s envelope and got out before they rose.

  There is a coffee shop on Sixth Avenue where the waitresses wear aquamarine polyester dresses and running shoes and have names like Shirley and Suzette. That coffee shop was as far as I could go without thinking about where I was heading. I sat in a booth with my back to the wall and ordered coffee. The bitter black liquid burned the roof of my mouth, reassuring me I was finally awake.