Night Shadows

by Greg Herren

  Faye had photographed the aftermath, too. She couldn’t catalogue the sucking sound as what was left of the young woman was pulled off the tracks, or the smell of charred flesh and other offal that rose up off the place where the woman had been under the train, but Faye took shot after shot as the EMTs got Esperanza onto the backboard and strapped tourniquets and put pressure bandages on her, hung the IV that they hoped—or maybe didn’t—would keep her alive, and pushed morphine into the drip.

  Faye just kept shooting—the IV bag streaked with blood, the blue and yellow vial of morphine, the silver-foil warming blanket to try to prevent the shock that had set in an hour before, the expressions of fear, pain, and something else Faye couldn’t name on the face of Esperanza and the faces of the EMTs.

  As Esperanza had been lifted up onto the platform, Faye had kept on shooting—photographing the EMT whose job it was to collect the body parts left behind in the hope—esperanza, Faye thought—that something might be re-attached if the woman made it into surgery before she died. An arm sheared off at the shoulder, a leg in two pieces, a slab of flesh with shredded muscle and mangled bone, something else red and pulpy that Faye couldn’t identify. All of these went into plastic bags and coolers filled with cold packs, then were handed back up onto the platform, like this was some creepy Christmas tailgate party, and all the while, Faye kept shooting photo after photo.

  The woman hadn’t died. Esperanza had lived, missing an arm, a leg, part of her shoulder, several ribs, and a section of pelvis on the side where she’d been sliced apart by the train. The excisions had left her with just a sheer covering of skin over that half of her body, so that some of her organs—a lung, a kidney—could almost be seen through the bluish-pink layering of muscle and flesh that resembled uncooked chicken. The woman’s hideous deformity remained a constant reminder of her momentary misery and sudden desire for the obliterating death that never came after all.

  Grateful that Faye had been down there on the tracks with her, Esperanza had allowed Faye full access to her recovery, and the photo essay, A Cry from the Tunnel: Woman on the Tracks, had become a coffee-table book that one critic called “art of the creepiest, most intrusive, most voyeuristic, most repugnant sort. Even Nan Goldin or Diane Arbus wouldn’t touch this stuff. We really don’t need to see everything, just because it’s there,” he had written. Faye had smiled a grim smile when she had read that, telling her assistant, Sonja, who had brought the review to her with trepidation, “But that’s the whole point—no one wants to touch it. Yet the organs are still going to be pulsing just below the skin, aren’t they, whether we want to see them or not?”

  Other reviews had been laudatory, but had more than hinted at the dark side of Faye’s artistry and one had gone so far as to mention Faye’s parents’ deaths as a possible foundation for what the critic had called Faye’s “addictive and addicting response to the grisly and profane.”

  There had been a book signing downtown, which was well-attended, and Esperanza had been there in her wheelchair, with a cousin and some guy she had met in rehab. There had been a big party after at Locande Verde, in the Greenwich Village Hotel, that had packed the restaurant, but Esperanza had left after the signing and Faye hadn’t tried to stop her. Faye and Esperanza both knew she should have died. Faye wasn’t sure how long it would be before Esperanza tried to kill herself again. Faye only hoped this time she would be successful.

  After the party, there had been the inevitable—some had gone home and others had wanted to keep partying. Faye had taken a cadre off to dance at Henrietta Hudson because even the boys were welcome there, although she never went for the boys, just the tough girls.

  The night at the club had gone late and Faye had wanted to see the river when she left, not quite drunk, but barely sober, after some quick and unexpected finger-fucking sex in the bathroom with an assiduous publicist from a rival publisher. She’d taken a cab to the meat-packing district. Faye didn’t live down there anymore, but when she had, on Horatio Street, she had woken up nightly when the trucks had rolled in and some nights she’d gone to the window and stood, just to watch the big hunks of flesh and bone travel from one place to another, bodies of animals hanging from big racks, just like clothing in the garment district.

  This night Faye got out of the cab near her old apartment and just walked. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to see—the river or the meat—but she wanted to see something that wasn’t there at the book signing or the party or the club. The meat-packing district was all trendy now, with the High Line and the Hotel Gansvoort and the old slaughterhouses turned into lofts. There were only eight or nine meat-packers left and none of the edgiest S&M bars that used to be there, like the Mineshaft. And yet she still wanted to go, still wanted to think about what it had been like when she did live there, before gentrification took over. It hadn’t been that long—not even ten years.

  She pulled her camera out of her bag and walked away from the river and toward where the trucks would be unloading the meat. It was almost four a.m. and she was looking for flesh—dead flesh, cut slabs of flesh, chunky, meaty flesh, and the commingling smell of blood. And something else Faye couldn’t quite name. Maybe, if she kept looking, she would find it.

  11.

  Faye’s grandmother had found her on the floor that night, awakened by the sound of her small body falling, catching the side of a chair as she went down. She had lifted Faye up off the floor and as Faye came to, had asked her what had happened. Faye just stared at her, but said nothing. She knew she should tell, but what was there to tell, really? She sat in her grandmother’s lap on one of the chairs where the woman had sat. Which one was it? Which one had she been tied to? Which one had her organs on the plate in front of her? And how could she live without her organs? Faye’s operation doll was empty when the organs were out on the floor when she played with it in her room. Was the woman empty, too?

  Faye couldn’t think about any more of it. She wished she hadn’t looked at the pictures because now that was all she could see—the pictures and the table, the chair and the woman, the plates and the organs. Were they the same plates that her grandmother put down at breakfast and dinner? Was the meat they were eating the organs from the woman?

  Faye felt hot again, and sweaty. Her face was burning hot, like she was in the sun. She wanted to go to sleep. She wanted to forget about the pictures. Her eyes started to burn and she felt tears coming down her face.

  Her grandmother felt her forehead and whispered, “Oh, you’re burning up. No wonder you fainted. Let’s get you to bed.”

  She had carried Faye upstairs herself, then, not waking her grandfather to come and get her. Her grandmother had laid her on the bed, on top of the covers, and gotten clean pajamas and told her to put them on. She had left the room and come back with a washcloth. She wiped Faye’s face and the cloth felt cool and now Faye was sleepy and not thinking about the pictures anymore. Her grandmother got her into the bed and covered her up, still wiping her face with the washcloth.

  “Are you feeling better, dear? I know this is all very hard on you. I’m not surprised you’re sick. Things will be better when you go off to school. It will be new and strange at first, but it will be good for you, you’ll see. How do you feel now?”

  Her grandmother had looked at Faye, her face full of concern and caring. Even in the dim night-light, Faye could tell she was worried.

  “I think it was the meat,” Faye said. “I think the meat from dinner made me sick. I don’t want to eat it anymore. Please don’t make me.” And Faye’s eyes had filled with tears and her grandmother had stroked her hair.

  “Well, we’ll have to find something else to feed you, then, dear, won’t we? But for now, no more meat until you are better, okay?”

  Faye had slid down under the covers and put her head on her grandmother’s lap.

  “Thank you,” was all she said, and then she fell asleep.

  12.

  After Esperanza and the book and the controversy, Faye ha
d more cachet at the paper. She went into the editorial meeting a week after the book party and asked if she could do something really different. Faye wanted to do a two-part series on women in Congo and Afghanistan.

  “These wars are endless,” she had said. “And the women are the primary victims. Our readers know about these places—think of all the African immigrants here in New York,” she had argued. “And we’re still in Afghanistan. Even if we leave, nothing will have changed there for women. It will still be the most hellish place on Earth after the DRC. Give me three weeks. I’ll get you something no one else has. Hell, I may do the stuff in Afghanistan in a burka.”

  Faye had detailed the stories of gang rapes and acid burnings. She pulled up the page of facts from her iPad that she’d compiled with the help of a woman she knew at an NGO and read off the string of ritualistic mayhem: 15,000 rapes a month in DRC. Hundreds of acid burnings in Afghanistan. Women raped and eviscerated on their way to get water in the bush. Women raped and then stoned to death. Women flayed alive. Women tortured with unspeakable brutality and no one paying attention. No UN sanctions. No invasions. Nothing.

  Just so much killing.

  “You understand,” Faye told them, leaning forward and looking at each of them, “these are going to be photographs no one else has, stories no one else has. But it’s going to be ghastly and hideous and no one in this room is going to want to look at these photographs, let alone our readers. But we have to make them. We have to make them.”

  When Faye had finished detailing all the ways a woman could be mutilated in the service of war, she knew the assignment was hers. Not for the right reasons, of course, but hers, nevertheless. She could practically see the word light up on everyone’s forehead: Pulitzer. It was a done deal. She knew it would be.

  It was easier than she’d expected: The main thing was the vaccinations and buying some long scarves and that burka. The latter had been a bizarre experience in a small shop in Jamaica Heights. The shop window was filled with mannequins that were dead white, covered in various dark-colored burkas, some with a fabric that had a pattern woven into it that could only be seen up close. Inside the shop, the mannequins were just the same: Only the white slit where the eyes should have been showed, giving each mannequin an eerie look, as if the burkas clothed ghosts. An unconscious metaphor, Faye thought, considering that under the burka, all women became invisible.

  Faye left New York for Kinshasa ten days after the editorial meeting. Standing in her apartment a few hours before she took the cab to the airport, she thought, this was the last one—the last story. She was going to leave the paper after this. She was going to put together a show that would be a retrospective of her life’s work. Faye already knew what she would title it: Ordinary Mayhem. She was already writing the copy for the book that would follow it.

  Faye walked into the small room that served as her studio and shut the door behind her—force of habit. She closed the blackout shade on the window over her work table and walked to the old apothecary cabinet that stood against the far wall, behind the door. There were curtains over the glass doors in a deep burgundy red. Inside the cabinet, on the six shelves, were a series of jars in different sizes. She stood and looked at them for a time, then reached in and touched one, then another. She took out one of the largest jars, walked to the table, and put it down. She sat in the chair, looking at it, then reached for her notebook and wrote a few sentences.

  On the wall opposite her table were photographs—rows and rows of photographs. She stared at them, then made more notations in the notebook. The book about Esperanza had just been a start. Soon she would have that show. The gallery exhibit—that was going to reveal a completely different side of her work. Not just the photographs, but the other things. It would definitely be mixed media. She had already had several offers from gallery owners. She had chosen one at the edge of SoHo—still trendy, but enough money to get her what she wanted in the end. The notoriety and the attention.

  For a brief moment she thought of her grandfather, the darkroom, the other things. She thought of Sister Anne Marie. And of that night in Chinatown, with Shihong.

  Faye felt cold. She looked at her watch. Then she got up and put the jar back on its shelf. She closed the cabinet again, locked it, and left the room.

  It was time to go to the airport.

  13.

  It was summer before Faye went into the darkroom again at night. Her grandfather would invite her in during the day, but Faye only went in after she had seen people in the studio and she’d seen the photographs being taken. Then she knew what would be on the floating pieces of paper in the trays. Then she knew she wouldn’t be sick. She wouldn’t see the women, or the table, or the pieces of the women on the beds and on the plates. She thought about these things all the time, but there was no one to tell about them, no one to talk to. When he went into the darkroom, her grandfather would wink at her, like they had a secret between them. And they did—Faye knew now that if her grandfather had taken those photographs, it was like everything else he took photographs of: the weddings, the graduations, the prom pictures, the family portraits. He arranged everything. She could almost hear him saying to those women, “Now lick your lips and tilt your head up.”

  And then what had he done? And where had he done it? And why?

  There was something so strange for Faye about the secret. She knew it—she’d figured it out that night at the table, and then she fainted, because it made her sick to think about it. Yet she wasn’t afraid of her grandfather. Every night he would kiss her before she went to bed and it didn’t scare her, it didn’t even make her feel creepy. Sometimes she thought she’d made it all up in her head, that it never really happened. But then he would wink at her and she would think that it had to be because of the secret, because he knew she knew and that it was something they shared.

  He told her over and over that he would give her a camera in a few years so that she could take her own pictures. “You’ll see things, and you’ll want to photograph them,” he told her. “You’ll want to see them over and over again. Because even though you have the memory of something, seeing it again, having the picture—it’s just like being at that place or doing that thing all over again. And it makes you feel—” He had stopped talking for a moment and she saw the look on his face. He was remembering. He was remembering the women and the parts and the table. And she had to look away. It was better if she looked away.

  But he had started talking again, and had told her that until she had a camera, she should draw pictures of things she saw that meant something to her. She should keep a notebook. And he had given her some special pencils that were very sharp and in a little box. They were different colors and he had told her to try to make the colors match the things she saw. He had also given her a little notebook. It had thick white paper in it with no lines and it had a spiral binding so she could tear out the pages if she wanted to.

  Then he had taken her out back, into the yard, and he had said, “Look at this, you should draw this,” and he had pointed at the edge of one of the flower beds.

  Faye had looked and there was a small dead shrew there. Its eyes were open and so was its mouth. It looked like something had surprised it all of a sudden. Then Faye looked closer and she saw that it had a tear in its stomach and some of the guts were out on the ground. She didn’t want to look at it anymore, but her grandfather said, “Now go inside and draw the shrew. Draw everything you saw. Because then, when you want to remember it, it will be right there for you to look at.”

  Faye’s grandfather had been looking down at her as she bent over the flower bed, and as Faye looked up, she could see his face, all excited. What she didn’t know was whether he was excited about the dead shrew or about her drawing it.

  *

  Faye still remembered the night when she had fainted in the kitchen and her grandmother had taken her upstairs. It had been cold on the floor, but she had still felt really hot. She’d stayed in bed for almost two w
eeks after that. There had been a trip to the doctor who had told her grandmother that Faye was suffering from trauma, just as her grandmother had been saying all along to her, to everyone. The anguish over her parents’ deaths, plus being uprooted from her home—it had all been too much, the doctor told them. Faye’s immune system was worn down, the doctor said, and she was prey for infection. He had given her grandmother a prescription for some pills that Faye had to take for two weeks, to make the infection go away, and before they left the office, a dark-skinned woman in a bright pink uniform with little smiling animals on the shirt had taken three glass vials of blood from her arm.

  The doctor had also said that Faye needed to be back in school. That too much time had passed—“It’s been several weeks since the accident”—and she might end up being left back a year if she didn’t return. He recommended tutoring if there were problems adjusting to the new school in a different borough.

  “I know Brooklyn is like a foreign country to her,” he’d told her grandmother, “so whatever we can do to help the transition. This is, you know, compounding the trauma.”

  He also recommended a therapist. “She needs to talk to someone, talk it out,” he had said, while he rubbed Faye’s shoulder like she was a cat.

  Faye had started at St. Cecelia’s on Valentine’s Day. The school was different from her other school—there were only girls and nuns in habits taught all the classes. A priest came every morning and gave Holy Communion to the girls who were old enough. Faye would have her first Holy Communion in May. She was sorry her mother wouldn’t be able to see that, because she had wanted to make Faye’s dress. They had talked about it at Christmas, before the accident.