Face

by Aimee Liu

  But her mood shifted back to neutral as we repacked the box. “Maybe Dad was a spy,” she mused, “and had to destroy his past identity to save the woman he loved.”

  A year or two later Anna would rather have slit her wrists than make a statement like that, but then she was still reading Anne of Green Gables and hadn’t yet heard of Hendrix. And I still believed every word she said.

  That evening when I asked my father if he really was a spy, he laughed out loud. “Who said that? Do I look like James Bond?” To which Anna screeched, “You actually thought I meant it! You retard, I bet you think Mum’s Mata Hari.”

  “You know, you haven’t changed a bit,” I said now, interrupting Anna in the middle of a detailed description of “chakra enhancement seminars” (which sounded suspiciously like orgies).

  She squared her shoulders, straightened her spine, looked me in the eye. “Oh, no, Maibelle, it is you who have not changed. The Dhawon says—”

  “Fuck the Dhawon!”

  “Oh, she does.” Henry burst out laughing.

  My father set down his cup and placed his hands flat on the table. He looked as if he wanted to say something, but instead bent into a cough.

  “Stop it, Henry,” said my mother.

  “You’ve never really believed in anything,” I said. “Not in what you say or do. Not in the people who love you. Not even Mum or Dad. Everything’s always a game with you—to prove your own superiority.”

  Anna stiffened with a twitch I recognized from childhood as her preparation for attack. “And what is it you believe in? Oh, never mind. I know. You believe pictures of Kewpie dolls and nose-hair clippers are going to save the world. Fulfillment is just a click of the shutter away—”

  “That’s enough!” My father’s voice erupted with an immediate, shattering clarity. His face had gone pale, eyes bulging as if he were witnessing a crime. His Adam’s apple rose and fell several times, but when he opened his mouth next, all that emerged was that pinched, disapproving cluck.

  Anna’s wrong. Memories matter. And not just for tracking time or holding an album in your hands when everyone who ever loved you is gone. Memories contain our secrets. They answer our questions. They tell us who we are and sometimes what we need. They give Anna’s “timeless, eternal present” a reason to exist by making history.

  Too bloody relevant.

  I can only guess what my father meant by that. Childhood in Shanghai. College in New York. Active duty as a photojournalist working the Pacific theater during World War II. Except for that one box of robes and brushes, his past lives were buried by the time I made my entrance. The dad who watched me growing up was a tinkerer, a maker of laborsaving devices. He never touched a camera, never discussed his memories. And my mother said he’d destroyed the photographs that once had made him famous.

  I was a freshman in college before I saw any of those pictures. One of my teachers, eager to find out if I knew why Dad had withdrawn into obscurity, showed me some clippings she’d collected during the thirties and forties. Strange, anomalous shots. War pictures, only instead of showing the military side, they showed ordinary people in places that didn’t make sense. Children running, screaming down streets strewn with shards of glass, bomb craters, and outrageous feathered and flowered hats. A white man in spats and tails cradling a bloodied black infant. A woman with a gold stud in her nose clutching a pig in the front of an army jeep. A tall blond man intently lighting a cigarette as a group of ragged Chinese rush past with a headless body in a wheelbarrow.

  As I stared at the images my father had captured all those years ago I had the feeling my skin was lifting from my body, my mind was being rearranged. I recognized these pictures. I knew them. They were my dreams. My nightmares. Not exactly, of course. But so close.

  My teacher fired her theories at me. Because the scenes my father had witnessed were too horrifying? Or had he gotten too close to his subjects? Maybe he felt his work was misinterpreted when it appeared in print? Or he somehow felt he’d failed to capture what he was striving for?

  Her words blurred together. I must have seen these pictures before. I’d felt the exact helplessness and outrage, the same grief and love that seemed to engrave each frame. These were the terrors that, night after night, roused me screaming and weeping from sleep.

  The next day I called my mother at the gallery and described the shots to her. She was very excited to hear that my teacher knew of Joe, that she had these pictures, even if they were just tear sheets. But, no, she insisted. I couldn’t possibly have seen them before. Not without extensive research on my part.

  “Probably just déjà vu, Maibelle. You are your father’s daughter, after all. In a way, those pictures are in your blood. If you can tap into them, even intuitively, it will be to your advantage. God only knows why he quit, but in his time Joe was a master. You must never forget that. His talent—those images—are your legacy.”

  3

  Tommy Wah was Henry’s best friend and his partner in crime. The high point, which I believe may also have launched the slow death of their friendship, came when they were in sixth grade.

  They’d worked it out with Jimmy Yang, whose father was an herbalist. He supplied a powdered aphrodisiac used in chicken breeding. Tommy and Henry sneaked into the teachers’ lounge and dumped the drug into the coffee urn, and when Mrs. Dixie returned from lunch, a large rooster stood on her desk to receive the effects of the powder.

  The experiment was a dud. Mrs. Dixie promptly sent for the janitor, Mr. Liberty, and told him to return the bird to Mr. Wah. Then, rather than look for the individual pranksters, Mrs. Dixie punished the whole class. The reward for mischief of this sort, she told them, was a very special medicine. And with that, she escorted Henry and Tommy down to the teachers’ lounge, instructed them to carry the coffee urn back to the classroom.

  “It usually tastes like the sludge of death.” She motioned the boys to lift the urn straight, not to spill. “But today it’s got a special flavor— tastes just like the syrup of reason.”

  The class grudgingly drank the brew without naming the bad boys (Henry and Tommys popularity saved their skins) and, incredibly, not one person developed a sudden, uncontrollable urge to mate with a chicken. No one told on Mrs. Dixie, either, because to tell that this teacher made her students drink poison would beg the question “Why?” which, in turn, would lead to lost face. Since Mrs. Dixie had elected not to entangle parents or the authorities, her students accepted her justice—and the mild runs induced by the coffee elixir.

  Henry was just glad he hadn’t had to deal with the two-step of Mum’s rage and Dad’s resignation. After all, it was only a joke.

  “What if old Dixie-belle had really gotten the hots for that rooster?” he said. “That would’ve been worth getting caught!”

  He and Tommy sprawled on Henry’s bed, sorting baseball cards. I was allowed to sit and watch because, as long as I kept quiet, my presence didn’t count.

  “Better it didn’t work,” said Tommy, whose father had been so astounded to see his prize bantam in the arms of the school’s black janitor that that night he lectured Tommy about thieving and ordered him to spend the next week memorizing Dr. Sun Yat Sen’s First Steps in Democracy.

  “Aw, c’mon. It would’ve been a pisser. Gimme Roger Maris.”

  Tommy tossed him the card. “I mean it. Jimmy thought it was a joke, too, but if the stuff had really worked, his dad would have lost too much face.”

  “But if it worked, it should be great for business!”

  “It’s not supposed to work on people, you jerk. It’s meant for chickens. And it’s Jimmy’s dad’s job to see his medicines are used right. If his own kid fools around with the powder, it doesn’t make him look too good.”

  “So?” Henry said.

  “So people stop talking to him. The tongs tell everybody stay away from his shop. He’s got to give them big money to get his face back. And Jimmy’s got to pay, too.”

  “Yeah? How?”

/>   “You know. Going to Chinese school. Helping in the store instead of hanging out at the arcade. Being a dutiful son.”

  “Sounds pretty dumb to me. There.” Henry patted one last card into the box before him. “American League, 1961. A full set of Topps. Bet you can’t beat that.”

  “Bet you don’t have a single card with a Chinese ballplayer.”

  “There aren’t any.”

  “So why d’you think I’d even want a full set of Topps American League 1961?”

  “Because in a couple of years it’ll be worth a lot of money, you dodo.”

  Tommy got up and crossed the room. When he reached the door, he turned and said, “Why you don’t understand about face is because you have no face to lose.”

  I’ve been spotting him ever since I moved back. A wide, dark head bobbing up behind the peaches in the Bedford Street fruit stand. The chiseled face with Ray-Bans in a parked Cadillac on Broadway, or that Asian couple leaning close over engagement rings in a midtown diamond store. A man in a kung fu studio, eyes fixed with such complete concentration that I was absolutely positive. But people change between age fifteen and twenty-nine. I held my distance because I knew I wouldn’t be sure of Tommy Wah if he tapped me on the shoulder.

  When I called this morning, though, I knew his voice at once. Smooth and cautious, like waves against long grass.

  “Maibelle. Where are you?”

  “New York.”

  “When you didn’t answer my letter, I thought—”

  “You thought correctly. I guess you haven’t found anyone yet.”

  “I’ve only just signed the publishing contract.” The waves rippled into whitecaps. “I was hoping you’d turn up.”

  “I’ve moved back.”

  “Oh.” He sounded confused. Possibly disappointed. “Your address sounded so perfect. Sunridge Street. Playa del Rey. It sounded rich. Happy.”

  “It sounded like planes taking off and landing. And used condoms washed up on the beach. I moved from there years ago.”

  “I see.” He clearly didn’t at all.

  “Look, I don’t know what pictures of mine you saw—”

  “Landscapes. Snow.”

  “I thought so. No people. You want people, don’t you? I don’t do people.”

  “I have a feeling about this, Maibelle. Or I wouldn’t have written you.”

  “Those snowflakes were an eternity ago, and I never wrote you back. Why’d you call again?”

  “I saw you from a bus. You were with some blond guy in the Village.”

  I glanced out the window, half expecting to catch the glint of a distant telescope. I yanked the curtain.

  “Then you knew I was here.”

  “I figured you were visiting—I wanted to catch you before you left.”

  I was going to be firm about this. Turn him down flat. I’d go back. I’d have to, it was all of a part, like a search-and-destroy mission. But not this way. Not with a witness. Or an escort. Certainly not someone who him self might have been part of the problem. But what he was saying now threw me. Random coincidence? I didn’t believe in random coincidence.

  “No,” I said.

  He didn’t answer right away. From outside my curtain came the shouts of children, car horns, the rumble of the BMT. The return address on his letter had been Pearl Street. Chinatown. But the silence at his end of the phone was deafening. There was no silence in Chinatown. Not that I remembered.

  “Meet me,” he said. “Do me that favor.”

  I closed my eyes but failed to conjure his face.

  “This afternoon,” he said.

  “I’m busy.

  “Where you going to be?”

  I had only the vaguest of plans to visit my Thirty-fourth Street discounter. “Midtown.”

  “Empire State Building at two?”

  “I’m afraid of heights. Besides, it’s for tourists.”

  “One of my favorite places, too. And it’s a cloudy day. I’ll meet you at the elevator, we can ride up together.”

  I could have been more creative about my afternoon agenda, or said I don’t grant favors to men I don’t know. I could have stood him up. Instead, I arrived early to meet this old neighbor turned stranger who’d invited me to the top of a skyscraper on a day with zero visibility.

  The lobby echoed with the shuffle of feet, the gossip of idle ticket takers. Plush ropes striped the empty space in front of huge gleaming elevators. When I was six, my mother brought me here one morning on the way up to her gallery. The elevators seemed as big as monsters then, and the wind on the observation platform made me cry.

  Today I waited five minutes, then turned back through the revolving doors, out to the grim June murk—and a pair of dazzling, platter blue eyes. He had a smile the width of the whole back forty. “Excuse me, ma’am.” A perfect summertime drawl.

  He brushed my elbow in his haste to follow a barrel-chested Japanese woman wearing flip-up sunglasses. They disappeared into the Greek deli across the street.

  “I’m sorry, Maibelle.”

  A shadow fell and the weight lifted from my arms.

  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 let
ter ‘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.”