Face (21 page)

“Arnold, can’t you do something?” shouts one of the passengers to her husband.

Do something. I feel as if I’ve forgotten a critical detail, a burner I’ve left on in my apartment, something I’m supposed
to be doing. As if any second they’ll all look my way and I’ll realize I am naked. I can’t move.

The tourists are clambering back into the bus when a woman steps from the center of the advancing column and screams, “You
come gawk at us!”

She has thick bangs that stop just short of charcoal eyes. Her hair, coiled on top of her head, is held with an elaborate
lacquered comb. She is as beautiful as I remember the Butterflies.

“You think Chinese are freaks?” She leaps forward and jabs her finger at a man with a Marine cut and red and orange Hawaiian
shirt beside whom she does, in fact, look like a dwarf. “Well, how do you feel now!”

Arms rise. Metal glints in their hands. I feel the pavement slide beneath me as the tourists shriek.

“They’ve got guns!”

The throb of the bus’s engine rises like the beating of a whale’s heart, and I instinctively lean into it, warm air drawing
me down and back against the wall of steel. I trip. My hands grab, close, find a dark space low to the ground. I crouch with
my head pulled in, seeing nothing.

The moments stretch, immeasurable, thick with the silence of the engine’s din. My eyes open. The asphalt glistens with summer
heat. The tread in the bus tires travels in waves. Slowly, slowly, I remember what I’m supposed to be doing.

My fingers locate their target and begin the long return journey back through what seems a black, heavy ocean.

I am supposed to see.

But when I finally lift my eyes, I am blinded by scalding white light. Around me, the tourists not yet back on the bus tip
sideways. Moans erupt. Hands fly to faces. I watch red and blue and yellow, a screen of sizzling dots.

“Again!” the beautiful woman cries, and again the world turns white.

I sense rather than see the last of the tourists escape into the bus, just as I sense the concealed faces watching from overhead
windows and the deadly blur of traffic inches from my toes. I hold my circle of glass to my face as if it could protect me
and dash across the path of light, directly in front of the beautiful woman, into the shade of the phone booth.

“Stop!”

A cluster of elderly merchants trotting down Mott Street waves past me. They all yell at once.

“Pay no attention! You come see. Okay tourist. Good deals for you.”

The crackle of flashbulbs eases. The chant shifts.

“Uncle Tom! Uncle Tom!”

The merchants run between the protesters and the bus, laughing too loudly and hopping like wind-up toys. The doors of the
bus have been pulled closed, turning the passengers to ghosts behind their protective glass.

I realize I’ve stopped breathing as a two-hundred-pound linebacker in a driver’s cap comes around the front of the bus with
a carton of take-out food in one hand and a walkie-talkie in the other.

“You kids want the cops, you got ’em.”

The protesters hesitate, exchanging glances, then resume their chant.

“Marge, you there?” the driver shouts into his mouthpiece. “I got a problem down here in Chinatown.”

They grudgingly form a gantlet through which the tourists may pass. The driver signs off but the merchants keep shouting,
wheedling, assuring the passengers of bargains they cannot refuse, and in a few minutes the Middle Americans are back on schedule,
only mildly disturbed and maybe now amused by the cluster of Chinese-American Yippies who trail them with occasional flash
shots to remind them why they are here.

I follow stupidly, using only my eyes, as the parade moves back up Mott Street.

Suddenly one of the protesters, a man with a ponytail, spins around
barking like a seal. The roundness of his face, like a plate, registers. I release the shutter.

“Hah! This one’s got some nerve! Think we’re putting on a good show, huh? Come to the Chinatown zoo, lady?” He leaps toward
me.

I freeze. My hands tighten around my father’s Leica, but that’s the cause, not the way out this time.

The long-haired man dances close, peering at me through hands shaped like binoculars. The others form a tight circle around
us, raise their cameras, taunt and jeer. The flash thunders, splinters into a thousand shards of light.

I charge my assailants, push through and run without looking across six lanes of wailing traffic. Three blocks, four. I begin
to slow down. They’re not coming.

At the far end of Catherine Street I finally reach the ruins of my safe haven.

The windows of Lao Li’s old store have been painted blind white, their frames splintered and chipped. From the upper floors
come the drone of heavy machinery, a competing hum of women’s voices. The noodle shop next door is now a “Unisex Hairstylist”
with a magazine stand out front. But the worst is the pillar—someone has taken a hatchet, decapitated the birds, slashed the
serpentine forms, and literally gouged out the figures’ faces, then smeared what was left with red, blue, and white graffiti.

As I lay my hands on the butchered forms, my fingertips turn to ice.

“Lou jan”

A grunt, forced laughter. It means barbarian.

From the corner of my eye I see two boys with chiseled faces leaning into the Unisex storefront. They leer at me and shove
fingers through the spikes of their hair. They spit.

I turn quickly, raising the Leica, shoot them once, twice, three times dead on, and start running. Keep running. All the way
uptown.

I
am watering my mother’s flowers, clipping the dead leaves, wiping soot from the balcony furniture. My brother has left his
Mad
magazines on the table, and I pick one up, thumb through it without focusing. I can’t see why Henry thinks Alfred E. Neuman
is funny. Nothing seems funny to me in this heat. The sky pulses and glows as if the whole world has a fever.

But as I put the magazine down, the weather changes. A wind comes up, first moaning, then roaring, scalding as the sky. My
feet peel upward and I grab a chair, but the wicker is too light. The twisted air pulls me onto the railing, where I perch
like a high-wire artist.

I look down on a street that’s vacant except for Lao Li, running but too far away and fading. Heat shoots from the pavement,
pounding upward with the noise of sirens. The city falls back, scorched white, and still the sky keeps pulling, knifing me
when I look up. I reach to shield my eyes.

A cool hand I can only feel, not see, presses back. Quiet.

Press, release. Press, release. It covers my eyes, strokes my face. Smooth skin scented with pine, meadow grass, and leather.

“Maibelle. You’ll get heatstroke sleeping out here.”

He lifts me in his arms and carries me up. Farther, away from the sky.

The television was on when I woke from this dream. The lights, too, though that was normal. I’d been watching television,
fell asleep fully clothed. Normal to leave things burning. But the television is not normal.

Outside, a siren screams. I count to ten before it passes.

I was watching
The Tonight Show
on Channel 4 when I fell asleep. Now it’s after three. Of course, the program would be different. A nature show about children
in Tibet. But the thing is, it’s on Channel 7. And the sound is off.

The listings are right here.
Tonight
4, Tibet 7. Not a switch that can happen by itself.

Another siren breaks the night.

Marge. This is her kind of show. Something she’d want me to see. Boys no more than four years old in saffron monk’s robes.
Himalayan peaks shrouded in clouds.

It’s for your own good.

The voice is in my head. I know that, but it doesn’t belong to me. Gravelly, harsh, and loving at the same time. I want to
believe it’s her talking to me. That her hand turned the knob. I don’t mind believing in ghosts. Quite the opposite.

But I don’t believe, not enough to stop the other possibility that crouches in the next room. No creaking floorboards. No
muffled breathing. I left the lights on in there, too, and no unfamiliar shadows cross the doorway.

See for yourself.

I see them, all right. They followed me home and waited for their chance. Then through the old lady’s yard. Leering. Sneering.
Spitting in the garden. And up the fire escape.

I grab the heavy flashlight I keep beside my bed and slide along the wall. At the threshold I stop and listen to the fading
sirens. Four feet
away in the shadows they run their thick practiced hands through the spikes of their hair…

I step around the corner quickly, brandishing my weapon.

Marge’s children blink back at me. An empty sofa. Equipment and gizmos. Relentless overhead light. The explosion of my own
breath exhausts me.

I touch the locket at my throat and imagine Johnny beside me, taking my hand, walking me forward. I count to twenty while
opening the kitchen, the bathroom, the front closet, all empty. Check behind the backdrop paper, through the curtains. I make
sure the dead bolt is turned on the door and, securely awake now, turn out the light.

Only when there is no chance of sleep can I take comfort from the dark.

I lift the window and straddle the ledge. No one. Marge is silent now, the television only a whisper beyond the wall. I must
have changed it myself.

I just don’t remember.

The lights of Greenwich Avenue burn through the night, but the street is as empty as in my dream. Not a sound except the renewed
eruption of sirens.

“I’ll do it.”

The line crackled slightly. “Maibelle?”

“I can meet you this morning if you want.”

“I’ll be at the seniors’ center on Bayard Street at ten.”

“Fine.”

More static. “This only works if we’re partners, Maibelle.”

“I don’t expect you to pay me.”

“Partners means this isn’t just a favor you’re doing me.”

“Don’t worry.”

Two hours later he was standing on the corner of Bayard and Elizabeth with a blue loose-leaf notebook under one arm and an
audio pack slung over the other. How smooth he looked. His skin, his hair, the
spotless slope of his white shirt. No wrinkles, no flaws, no tortured curls or stray threads. No spike-haired companions or
concealed flashbulbs. His seamlessness at once reassured me and put me on guard.

I carried two camera bags but he made no attempt to relieve me of these as he touched my arm in greeting.

“You don’t have to stick with me.”

I mimicked astonishment. “You’re not letting me loose!”

He smiled. “Partners.”

“And cover credit, of course.”

“Of course.” He offered his hand to shake on the deal. It felt solid, smooth as the rest of him, hairless.

I scanned for warning signals. Skidding heartbeat, ringing ears, the sweats. Nothing. The sidewalk stayed decisively beneath
my feet. The sky burned blue, not white. The weekday morning traffic was light and shopkeepers nodded politely as we passed.
I glanced at Tommy as he addressed them by name. Maybe I needed an escort, after all. If it worked, what was wrong with that?

If it worked, I would owe him dearly.

The senior citizen center used to be the five-and-ten where I bought my paper dolls. The outside has since been whitewashed
and a red and gold sign hangs overhead. A screen painted with the stone mountains of Guilin shields the window, and fluorescent
lights stripe the ceiling. As soon as we stepped into the hallway I heard the familiar shuffle of tiles, Chinese voices, hacking
coughs of lifetime smokers.

“They’ll see you as an outsider,” he said. “They might give you white eyes at first.”

“White eyes?”

“Turn up the whites to ignore you.”

“Wonderful.”

“Take it easy. After a while some of them might remember you. The rest will get used to you. I wouldn’t try to photograph
them until they do, though. Even the ones who’ve been here for decades, a lot still worry about deportation. They don’t trust
cameras.”