Face (8 page)

This one was about six feet tall. His eyebrows, all bunched together, looked as if they’d been painted with lacquer.

“There was a fire in the subway tunnel.”

The eyes, like gleaming black glass, and the rounded slope of his forehead—a Buddha’s bulge, the kids used to call it. And
the liquid voice.

“It’s all right.” But it wasn’t. He alarmed me. All the men I’d mistaken for him, and every one of them wrong. He was twice
the size and stronger, sadder. Yet when he smiled, two dimples drilled holes in his cheeks. I thought, those eyebrows must
fly apart like wings when he laughs.

“Still have time to go up?”

“Do I have a choice?”

He clutched my bags of photo supplies like hostages—"No"—and stepped into the revolving doors.

The observation platform was empty and gray with a cool, driving wind. The only suggestion of the city below was an occasional
spire. Downtown the Twin Towers poked up like a giant’s building blocks through the soft, rolling clouds. I imagined going
with the wind, leaping the steel barrier that might not hold anyway, out into that endless softness. The pressure joined the
magnetic sensation of the edge, drawing me forward and down, as if the floor were tipped outward.

I backed into a seat against the central wall that continued up the spire and took my packages from Tommy, held them in my
lap as anchors.

He went over and leaned against the barrier, the upper half of his body floating a hundred stories high. He looked directly
down.

“My parents brought me here on my fifth birthday in weather just like this,” he called over his shoulder. “Pop called it the
Emperor State Building.”

“I really am afraid of heights,” I yelled.

“He said the reason the clouds look solid when you get this far up is because of the Emperor of the Western Skies. He uses
the clouds to teach us mortals about humility; if a man climbs high enough, he’ll think he can just walk across and enter
the gates of heaven, but when he tries he’ll find out pretty quick, his path to heaven is a fast trip back to earth.”

He came away from the railing. A sudden gust flattened his shirt against his narrow chest, but he walked through the wind.

I’d be a perfect victim for Tommy’s Emperor. I knew the impossibility of the illusion, the end of the dream, but I felt the
alternative. If not yet completely for myself, then for Johnny. I used to look out the windows of planes expecting to see
him striding along with his feet in the clouds, wings spread. I never caught him, but I never stopped believing I would.

“You still bite your fingernails.”

Instinctively I curled my paws.

“That’s an observation, not an insult.”

His hands hung open by his sides. He had long, ringless fingers, no torn edges.

“What’s the ‘T’ for?”

“What T?”

“You signed your letter ‘T. Tommy.’”

“I call myself Tai now. But you wouldn’t have known me if I didn’t write ‘Tommy.’”

I let that digest for a moment.

“My sister calls herself Aneela. I still call her Anna.”

He sat at the other end of the bench and began to talk about his work. Social history, he called it. People in places. I thought
of my father’s photographs. People in places, as if there were an alternative. Places without people, yes. As my own pictures
proved. But not the reverse.

He crossed his legs, ankle to knee. The heel of his shoe was worn straight across the back. Mine always give along the outer
edges, reminding me of a certain crookedness to my gait. Not Tommy.

Social history seemed an unlikely vocation for a poulterer’s son. I wondered if it had something to do with his name change.
But there was Anna chiding, no, it’s not about abandonment, it’s a matter of finding the truth. Truth my ass. People who shuffle
their identity like a deck of cards make me suspicious. That goes for Tommy, too. Or Tai.

“Did my mother put you up to this?”

“Your mother doesn’t know me from a sewer rat. Never has.”

He got up and returned to the railing. I saw him flipping backward, over and down, falling silently into the great gray gauze
below.

“You’re giving me vertigo. Please don’t stand so close to the edge.”

He removed his arms from the railing and took a single step toward me. I began to shiver, but I was damned if I’d beg him.

“So. Will you help an old friend out?”

“Old friend?”

“Friend of your brother’s, then.” He hesitated. “And Li’s.”

“You haven’t spoken to Henry in years. And Li’s dead.” Though even as I said it I could see Lao Li, his gaunt face nodding,
one spidery hand lifted in amused benediction. I said, “It doesn’t make sense.”

“I told you, I was impressed by your work.”

“My work’s shit.”

“All right. I can’t pay. But I thought you might be interested, anyway.”

My teeth chattered. Strange noises jerked and rolled up my throat. The shivering grew into something akin to a seizure. He
didn’t seem to notice.

“I have a publisher, but the advance is nothing. I can pay expenses, that’s it. Of course, you’d share in any royalties…”

I turned away from him and the field of gray beyond him, and gripped the back of the bench. Still I felt myself moving backward,
leaping off as I did in my dream, gliding outward, arms spread and steady, just long enough for the illusion of flight to
take hold, then suddenly plunging headlong down through the gray to the white, blinding heat of the city below.

Laughter poured from my mouth like shattered glass. The wind snatched at it.

“I’m sorry.” He was behind me coming closer. Leaving the edge. “I didn’t mean to insult you.”

“I’ve got to get out of here.”

“Maybe—” He was turning me, both hands firm on my shoulders as if to keep me from running away, as if there were somewhere
to go besides space.

“You don’t want me,” I warned him.

The old lady next door has a bird. She sits outside admiring the brilliant blue and green and yellow feathers. She sips her
afternoon sherry with her photo album at her elbow, the bird’s bill thrusting between the bars of the large domed cage. The
macaw is as big as a cat.

“Pretty boy.” Her voice rises an octave and quavers. “Can you talk, pretty boy?” She takes her glass with both hands and sips
contemplatively. The bird pecks at the bars. I can’t see its expression from where I perch, but I read it as sullen.

Suddenly my neighbor lets out a raucous, shocking wolf whistle devoid
of the slightest quaver. The parrot answers with a predictable flapping of wings. One feather flies free of the cage, and
she grabs it, smooths it on her lap.

“Pretty boy!” She opens her album and slides the feather into a plastic sleeve, then slams the book shut. “I know! I’ll call
you Euripides!”

But before the bird can reply, the old lady’s nurse appears, briskly gathers up the glass and book, mutters about the mess
this creature is going to make, and wheels her patient inside.

Alone, the macaw squawks ferocious, unintelligible gibberish. The noise spills over the fence to the schoolyard, where the
kids pause periodically in their games to imitate the bird’s sounds. That only ups the ante, and he screeches louder. Finally
the old lady’s nurse storms out with a black cloth in her hands.

“Hush your damn squalling!” she yells over the din.

“Awwk! Fuck you, bitch!”

“All right, bird!” the kids cheer.

The nurse yanks the cloth over the top of the cage.

“Go on, bird. You tell her,” cry the children.

But the darkness has forced the bird’s silence.

The phone rang eleven times. I counted, willing it to stop, let me finish this glorious, frigid shower and go to bed. Maybe
a dreamless sleep. But no amount of wishing can stop my brother when he’s on the prowl.

“Hey, sis. What’s up?”

“Henry. It’s nearly midnight. I’m dripping wet—”

“What’s this? I’m trying to make a brotherly connection and you act like it’s an obscene phone call.”

I waited. The background roared with the street where my brother was calling from.

“I’m losing my sublet, and I figured—” A siren at close range cut him off.

“Have Mum and Dad rented out your room?”

“Maibelle. They’re convinced I’m a deadbeat as it is.” His next sentence dissolved in a confusion of angry male voices.

“Where are you?”

“Pay phone down the block.”

“Christ, Henry. Come on up. You can crash on the couch tonight. Just tonight.”

Henry is the one member of my family with whom I stayed in touch—albeit erratically—during my odyssey years. He never left
New York. In fact, he lived at home most of the time, designing software on a contract basis for Atari. My mother said, after
all his hands-on practice, he should be producing the crème de la crème of video games, and Henry claimed he was. Just a misunderstood
artist who wasn’t paid his due. Nevertheless, his last Christmas present to my parents was to move into an apartment of his
own. Apparently it wasn’t exactly his own.

“You weren’t staying with another Miss Argentina, were you?” I asked when he’d hauled the last of his bags upstairs. For a
period of time Henry had lost his heart to a call girl from Buenos Aires with an apartment the size of the Ritz and an exceedingly
jealous john who killed for Baby Doc Duvalier.

“Nothing like that. This place belonged to a bond trader friend of mine. Until his SEC violations caught up with him.”

I gave my brother a soda, which he downed in one long draught before looking around. He took in the tripod and lights, the
compact stereo that kept me sane when setting up my shots, the rolls of backdrop paper, and display stands. The overflowing
crates of ideas awaiting my father’s plagiarism.

“Nice to see one of us inherited Mum’s knack for interior space.”

I opened the window as far as it would go and stuck my head out into the still, damp heat. “It’s like being smothered in velvet.”

“How poetic.” My brother turned on the radio, located an oldies station playing nonstop Motown greats, and started doing the
mashed potato in the middle of my set. He jumped down, bending his legs like Sammy Davis, Jr., backed into a Michael Jackson
moonwalk, then segued into a complex hip-hop routine. He reached out, begging, aping
an agony of desire for me to join him in the dance. I laughed and threatened to charge him for the paper he was destroying.

Then Fontella Bass began belting out “Rescue Me,” and the phone rang. Harriet. The noise was giving her mother panic attacks.
I did realize she was serious about Bellevue—I didn’t have a man up there, did I?

“No, Harriet. There’s no man up here.”

Henry pantomimed horror and tiptoed across the room with his hand clapped over his mouth.

“I’ll remind you once, just once. It’s against the law to disturb the peace.”

I silenced Ms. Franklin, and my brother collapsed on Marge’s sofa.

Same old Henry. He still flung his limbs around as if they were made of rubber. Still combed his hand through his hair like
a bad boy. He still watched the world through half-closed eyes, and I still wondered whether he was avoiding the view out
or restricting the world’s view in. Maybe that’s what Tommy meant.

Why you don’t understand about face is because you have no face to lose.

“I saw an old friend of yours the other day.” I tossed him a sheet and blanket and pulled up a folding chair. “Tommy Wah.”

“No shit! Tommy? Where?”

“Emperor State Building.” I smiled.

“No shit,” he said again, carefully.

“Mum didn’t tell you he called?”

“No, when?”

“Last fall.” I fingered my locket. “He’s changed his name to Tai.”

“Not him, too.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“So? What’s he want?”

“So he writes books. Calls himself a social historian. He wants me to take some pictures for his next project.”

Henry snorted and got up to investigate the contents of my refrigerator—several cans of tuna fish, a basket of peaches, some
moldy cheese, three cans of soda, a bottle of Schlitz.

“Mind if I have this?”

“Go ahead. I hate beer.”