Face (45 page)

I want to scream that she’s making it up. I try to, but no sound comes out. My bare feet are frozen to the floor, and still
that’s not good enough. She moves to a chair directly in front of me so she can pin me with those eyes of hers.

“You fell asleep in the car on the way back. You were having one of your nightmares then. But it was an old one, about Johnny
Madison. You kept crying out that he was flying. You shouted at him not to fly.”

I press my eyes shut against her stare. “I don’t remember.”

“I dropped you off back here. It was late. Mum and Dad didn’t know I was down, it was all so hush-hush. I went back to school.
I tried to talk to you about it a few times, but you never said anything except about your dreams. Then they stopped—or you
stopped calling me, anyway. I figured it was history. You’d as soon forget. I know I would, in your place. Then I was off
on my own thing. Tell you the truth, I forgot all about it until I sent you that letter.
That
was the weirdest thing. What are you getting dressed for?”

“I need air.”

“Are you crazy? It’s nearly midnight.”

“Anna, please. I can’t stay here. I—I need some time.”

“You remember, then?”

I remember fragments at first. A sky like spilled ink. The Pentax my mother had given me for my fourteenth birthday. Fish
scales glittering like sequins along the sidewalk. Li was dead, but I didn’t know it. I hadn’t been back in so long, was feeling
guilty about not seeing him. Too guilty to go specifically to visit him, but the camera gave me my excuse. Like my house key,
I thought, like my balcony. My justification.
I wanted to shoot the storefronts. The ginseng and strangled ducks. The dancing chicken. Then I’d drop in on Lao Li.

Chinatown wrapped around me as if I’d never left. It was a few days before New Year’s. Twinges of orange peel and incense
in the air, the calliope of Chinese voices. Storefronts filled with merchandise found nowhere else, that was more a part of
me than any of the designer
objets
with which my mother filled our uptown home. Even my own reflection—taller, paler, and more out of place than ever—seemed
part of the package luring me back, no longer cause to run away.

The cage of the dancing chicken was empty, but I managed to fill most of a roll with faces of children and old folks, dead
birds and fish. The temperature had dropped suddenly, a sure sign of snow, and it was darker than it should be for the hour.
I was heading for Li’s shop when I saw a boy I recognized squatting, playing craps with a group on the corner of Henry Street.
Long arms, a short neck. He wore a bright green scarf and was tugging at his hair. It was the intensity of his eyes as they
followed the cards, an intensity I knew I’d seen before. He won the round, was gathering up his winnings when he felt me—or
rather my camera—staring and waiting for him to look up. He obliged, shooting back the same triumphant grin he’d fired past
me after losing his cricket fight nine years earlier.

“Hey.” Only this time it was intended for me.

Fourteen years old with a Pentax for protection. Old enough. Young enough. Straddling the invisible line that separated one
warring territory from another.

I was disobeying my mother.

“You’re not to go traipsing to the far ends of the city on your own.”

“I’m fourteen years old!”

“Precisely.”

I smiled back at him with a flood of relief and gratitude that I’d been holding in wait all those years. I felt foolish, a
near grown-up suffering the emotions of a baby, but I could not stop grinning. I finished the roll while the boy preened and
swaggered for the camera. It was the camera that attracted him, as it had been the pigeon before. Underneath
my pleasure, I knew that. But I could use the camera to gain his favor. It wouldn’t fly out of my hands. I could hold onto
it and hold I did, pushing the shutter long after I knew the film was gone.

Finally he’d had enough. The game was over. His companions, fed up with his antics, had left. He came over and threw an arm
around my shoulder, asked my name. He said he remembered me, but not my name. I believed him.

“Maibelle,” I told him. “Maibelle Chung.”

He guffawed. “Right. Married to a Chinese, huh?”

I smiled and swallowed his ridicule, didn’t answer. He didn’t really remember me, but maybe that was better. We walked. He
kept his arm around my shoulder.

We passed a store window with a clock. It was nearly four. I’d told my mother I was going to the Y to use their darkroom.
I often lost track of time in the darkroom, so she wouldn’t expect me till late.

He was skinny, tight jeans, a black bomber jacket with red zigzag stitching. He had acne scars across his forehead, like Anna’s.
I think those scars, plus the memory of him under Old Wen’s arm, made me trust him. He didn’t swagger when we walked together.

“Maybe you knew my brother, Henry. In school.”

“Here?”

I nodded. The motion yanked my hair under his arm.

“I did school in Hong Kong. Just moved back last year.”

That was why I only remembered seeing him that one time. I worked hard to steady my voice. “What’s your name?”

“Mike. Hey. Mike and Maibelle. Sounds good, huh?”

I bit down hard to keep from blushing.

“Want to see inside an association?”

He could have asked me if I wanted to see inside the boiler room of the
Titanic,
I would have said yes. As it happened, I would very much have liked to see inside an association. But that’s not exactly
what he meant.

He took me to a building on Doyers Street with a fishmonger below,
five stories of tenements overhead. He opened the door to the stairway and, when he saw me holding back, said, “Just got to
pick up a friend. Come on.”

He couldn’t have been older than sixteen. Just enough older than me to look up to, not enough to fear. The stairwell was dark
and smelled salty and damp. I stayed close to him. At the top a door stood open to the roof. Cold air and gray light poured
through. We climbed three flights, and he led me into an unlocked apartment. The shades were drawn, no lights on. I could
see my companion’s outline, the shape of a couch, chairs, a table, nothing in detail. The room was thick with the stink of
fish and diesel fumes from outside. He made no move to switch on a light. He locked the door.

“Safety.” He pocketed the key. “You never know.”

My foot struck a can that was lying on the floor and liquid trickled across my toe. Beer. The stench came on suddenly, mixing
with the other smells. I felt queasy.

“Please.” I pulled at his sleeve. “Let’s go.”

But suddenly there were five of him. They must have come out of another room.

They jabbered in Chinese. The only words I recognized were
gui lou fan.
Barbarian.

My teeth began to chatter when they turned on a light and I saw the room, my captors. Cans, cigarette butts. The walls and
furniture were scarred with graffiti and knife cuts. Take-out cartons filled a fireplace and were strewn across the floor.
The sofa had been slashed so the stuffing popped out in fat, dingy wads. So much black. Hair, eyes, clothing, sunglasses in
the dark.

They fanned across the room, some staring, others casually avoiding my gaze. Mike picked up a can of Schlitz from the windowsill
and emptied it down his throat. My teeth were going like castanets and the chill up my spine made it impossible to keep the
room in focus. I felt rather than saw them closing in.

Then I must have passed out.

* * *

The next thing I remember is the cold. Like steel wool against my skin. Stripped from the waist down. My shirt up around my
shoulders. I felt the nakedness, couldn’t see it. What I saw was the gleam off cars, lights below turned to bulbous stars
through softly falling snow. Head down, arms up and behind. Someone holding me by the wrists. Tight. I started screaming,
but they’d gagged me. My tears froze in my eyes, turned the lights to crystals. My skin burned. My insides burned. They were
taking turns breaking into me, cutting deeper and deeper, so much farther below the surface than I’d ever imagined I could
be hurt.

The pain’s like fire, but it doesn’t seem real, like it’s somebody else’s fire, don’t you see. It’s mine. Let me take it from
you, Maibee.

Something was splitting inside me, looking away and up at the same time, seeing sky, though I could not turn my head, white
and black, no gray. Then suddenly I pulled forward and down, down five stories. Stories. Women hacking at carcasses, stacking
oranges, wrapping money in red and gold papers would look up, see a bare-assed bleeding girl fly by. Split like a chicken.
Dropping, spreading, lifting and soaring out of the picture, the story. Escape.

Johnny told me the blood wasn’t mine, had nothing to do with me. It was a sign.

Still the smell of fish, stronger, stronger. The part of me that was no longer part of me began to retch.

The convulsions warned them, they hauled me back over.

Their voices were hushed now. Dark shadows in the moonless night. The vomit, flowing through my gag, overpowered the fish,
the brine, the smell of sex. Until a pail of water hit me in the face and backside, followed by fabric. My clothes. They released
my hands but flashed the blade of a knife before my eyes. It was snowing.

“Get dressed.” Mike’s voice, hard as a chisel.

I scrambled, choking and swallowing, gagging once more. I began to faint again, but stopped myself, lest the nightmare start
over. Let it play out. Let it end.

Fingers pinched me as I worked, grabbed at my waist and breasts. Giggling and jabbing. Pulling my hair. All in Chinese.

“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.