Night Shadows

by Greg Herren

  Faye never spoke. She never asked about the photographs or what they meant or why the women had lost their faces or their eyes or their breasts or why one had been cut open on the little bed and everything inside her had been taken out and laid around her like…something Faye couldn’t quite describe.

  Faye didn’t say anything. She just stood there, looking at her grandfather standing in the doorway. She wondered if her father had known about the photographs. She wondered if her grandmother knew. She wondered if someone else should know about them. Someone other than her.

  And then her grandfather had stretched out his hand to Faye and she had walked toward him and they had gone upstairs together, each to their own room. Faye had lain in her bed and thought about the pictures for a long time, especially the ones where the pieces were on the bed, laid out around the body, and the way the woman’s legs were spread apart and the thing that had been between them. She thought about what the pieces were and what it meant that they were there, on the bed. She still felt sick, but not as sick as before. She thought about what her grandfather had said and how she didn’t understand what it meant. Then she rolled over on her side and she had gone to sleep.

  8.

  Faye had taken that week’s vacation her editor had offered, staying in San Francisco the whole time. She’d settled into a boutique hotel on Post Street where she was near enough to everything that she could walk, take a cable car, or, if she absolutely had to, drive. She’d driven up from Fresno on a Friday and taken a long nap before ending up on the Castro after eleven, drinking gin martinis because she’d never liked vodka all that much, and waiting for this one or that one to sidle up to her as they always did. Faye liked women and they liked her even more. They liked what they thought she was—they liked what she had learned to project since her days at St. Cecelia’s, since her days in the darkroom. Calm. She’d patterned herself after the saints she’d read about in those early years. Not the acts so much as the demeanor. Faye was always unfazed. In the clubs, Faye was always just sitting on the bar stool, looking, watching, seeing. She didn’t need to be eager. Not being eager drew people to her.

  The ones who liked her most were the tough ones, the ones who wanted to pin someone pretty to the wall or the bed—white, black, Latina, and Asian butches with shaved heads or faux hawks, with body art and piercings everywhere that mattered. In San Francisco, Faye had spent her first three nights in three different beds, but hadn’t found what she was looking for. She had walked through the Mission District and Pacific Palisades and back. She’d gone from bar to bar, beginning and ending at the Lex, beginning and ending with the same kind of women.

  On the fourth night, Faye had stayed away from the Castro and the Mission and had worked her way from her hotel toward Chinatown. She’d had a fruity, too-sweet drink with the clichéd umbrella and pineapple and cherry skewer in it at the tiki bar off Union Square with the Asian hostess. The place was a combination overpriced tourist trap and mob hangout. When Faye had walked from her hotel to the bar, she was pretty sure she was looking for more things to photograph, or some kind of trouble, she just wasn’t sure which. Time felt like it was standing still for her since she’d left the dead and dying children behind in the San Joaquin Valley, with the bougainvillea landscaping along the highways between one pretty little coffin and another.

  Maybe she just needed to get back to New York.

  She’d walked down Market Street late the night before, after two, after she’d exited the bed of the scrappy little Latina butch she’d left the Lex with around eleven. She’d gone to the Tendernob, the most crime-ridden place she could find in San Francisco, because it wasn’t New York and there wasn’t enough danger for her—or at least she hadn’t been to the city enough times to know exactly where to look for it, although everyone said the same thing: Stay away from the Tenderloin, stay away from the Tendernob. And so she had taken her camera down Market, over to Sixth, then back to Little Saigon, but there was nothing to see—homeless men, addicts, tranny prostitutes looking for dates or just money, a man who said he was a priest trying to talk people off the streets and into shelters. She watched an older Chinese woman trying to catch one of the night pigeons that were always down there whenever Faye had been in San Francisco, but she hadn’t caught it and both she and the woman gave up that game.

  Faye had walked around for a few hours, until it was getting light. This was the place, the Tenderloin, now working its way into gentrification like everywhere else, that Dashiell Hammett had written about in The Maltese Falcon. How could it be less dangerous now than it was then? Or had Faye become inured to danger because after her parents’ deaths, her grandparents’ house, and St. Cecelia’s, everything else had seemed so close to normal, even children burned to death in a Christmas pageant or children poisoned in their mother’s wombs?

  Faye had left and gone back to her hotel to sleep, the only photographs from her sojourn those of a petite Asian prostitute with a knife strapped to her thigh, the Chinese woman chasing the pigeon, and in the dark recess of an open doorway, the man dressed like a priest getting a blow job from a Latina transsexual.

  *

  Faye and the Asian hostess, Shihong, had sat talking and then left the tiki bar together and headed to Chinatown. Faye had always liked it there—had liked the smells and the guttural sounds of languages that weren’t English or Spanish. It was big and strange and seemed more like Hong Kong than San Francisco. It wasn’t like New York’s Chinatown—it was its own city, the biggest Chinatown in North America, the most foreign place Faye could find stateside. The rolling night fog, the closeness of the water, the hilly streets—all added something, an aura, an atmosphere, Faye couldn’t quite place, but she liked being there. She liked feeling completely anonymous.

  Shihong had led her through the maze of alley-like streets off Grant Avenue, after they had walked through the Dragon Gate. Shihong had pulled her into a darkened doorway and kissed her, hard, and Faye had felt the sleekness of the satin dress she wore as she ran her hands down Shihong’s body. Then Shihong had taken Faye to a place where she had ended up buying several animal netsuke, a dark little shop where no one spoke English and where she was the only customer.

  Afterward they had stopped for more drinks and Shihong had told Faye about Chinatown, her Chinatown. “No Joy Luck Club,” she had said, her soft voice surprisingly rough. “No PG movie. Look around you—no money, many secrets, lots of darkness. So much, I could never leave. The secrets become you, don’t they?”

  Shihong had looked straight at Faye and stretched out her hand to Faye and Faye had taken it, wanted to kiss it. The secrets become you. Faye decided to tell Shihong a story about secrets, a story she had only told one other time, to Sister Anne Marie. Shihong listened, without moving, except to sip from her drink. But when Faye finished telling the story, Shihong had looked at her, stared with an expression Faye, who was so good at reading other people’s faces, couldn’t quite discern. Then Shihong told Faye about a black market shop she thought Faye might want to see, “a shop that sells secrets,” she said, “a shop not”—she had briefly turned away from Faye—“for everyone. There are two Chinatowns, you know. One for tourists, one for us. I take you to the one for us.”

  They had left the bar, wending their way through the fog and a series of alleyways. Along the way Shihong would stop and pull Faye into a doorway here, an alcove there, and kiss her, hard. The kisses were hot and violent and Faye’s mouth felt bruised from the force of them. But she didn’t pull away. There was a kind of heat emanating from Shihong that Faye didn’t quite understand, but she wanted to see where it went. Even if it took her to a place she didn’t know.

  The two women kept walking, Shihong slightly ahead, her hand in Faye’s, almost as if she were pulling her along, until they reached a small shop on a tiny street, the name of which Faye had not seen—the streetlight over the sign was out. The name of the shop was written in Chinese characters—no English translation. Shihong had rung a be
ll and an elderly woman in traditional silk pajamas had answered the door. She and Shihong had spoken in whatever dialect they spoke—Faye had no idea, some kind of Cantonese, she assumed. She also could not discern the tenor of the conversation—was it friendly or rancorous? Shihong had lowered her voice while the old woman had raised hers. Faye had thought for a moment that she should leave right then—run, in fact, since the door was still open and she was fairly sure she could find her way back to Grant Street and out of here. The Castro was one thing. She had felt equal to the women she had bedded in the past few days. The Tenderloin had been the same thing—she spoke that language, always had. But here—here she was in a foreign country and one where she stood out; she was nothing like anyone, here, especially not here in the old part of Chinatown where some things clearly had not changed in the hundred and sixty-odd years since this place had been established.

  Faye edged back toward the door. It was definitely time to go. She needed to be back in New York. This was not the place for her.

  But just as she half turned to leave, the old woman reached into the folds of her trousers and pulled out a key, pressing it into Shihong’s hand and folding the fingers over it. She then turned toward Faye, bowed quickly, and shuffled away. Faye had been disarmed by the bow, chiding herself for being nervous. This was an old woman, not a threat. She remembered the feeling of dread she’d had at the morgue in Fresno. And in the end that had just been heat and maggots. Nothing dangerous. Nothing irreparable. Just an unpleasantness. Plus, she and Shihong had had a chemistry over drinks and with those kisses that was real, not fake.

  Faye looked at the woman as she disappeared up a staircase to the side of the shop’s interior and wondered for a moment whether her feet were bound—it had only been a little over fifty years since that barbaric practice had ended. Faye wished she’d paid closer attention. She knew that was a photograph she would like to have, although she wasn’t sure she could have asked for it.

  Shihong shut the door behind them and locked it with the key in her hand. She took Faye’s hand and Faye shook off her momentary fear as Shihong pulled her forward into the dark recesses of the shop. A dim amber light glowed beyond the doorway as they walked through a room made narrow by high stacks of shelves on one side of the pathway they were walking. On the other side were glass cases, like in a jewelry shop. Faye couldn’t really see anything in the dim light. Everything was dark—the wood of the shelves, the things on the shelves. The lights in the glass cases were off. She couldn’t discern where she was or what was there. Shihong stopped suddenly and turned toward her.

  “You saw her,” she told Faye, referring to the elderly woman. “Now you see why I cannot leave this place. This will always be my home.”

  Faye nodded, but wasn’t sure what Shihong meant. Was this woman related to Shihong? What was this place, exactly? Did Shihong live here? Faye flashed for a moment on the classic Roman Polanski film and wondered if perhaps she had stepped too far into the wrong story by coming here, to Chinatown, with this woman she’d known for barely three hours who had picked her up at a mob bar and had now locked her into a shop with no English name, a shop that held God-only-knew what.

  Shihong reached up above the two of them and switched on a small light. It illumined the shelves directly in front of them. On the shelves were rows of jars. For years Faye had never seen anything like that room at St. Cecelia’s. Now, in the space of a few days, she’d been treated to the anomalous organs in the Fresno morgue and whatever this was. Just as at St. Cecelia’s, these jars were above Faye’s head, not at eye level. The fact that she could not see them made her anxious suddenly, and she thought again that she should leave. She looked at Shihong, questioningly. The woman tossed her head back, her black hair whipping behind her, her long earrings making a light tinkling sound as she did so.

  “You said you like to uncover secrets,” Shihong said in a tone Faye could not decipher. “Here are secrets. What do you think now?”

  Faye had stepped back, away from the shelves, and looked up. She stared at what was arrayed all along the shelves. Faye, who was never unfazed, had gasped, her hand flying up to her mouth, stifling the scream that threatened to escape. She turned toward Shihong, but she was no longer there.

  *

  Faye had left the unnamed place many hours later, her left wrist sliced raw and open with a rope burn and bruises and dried blood. Her bag was heavy and full as she heaved it over her shoulder. In her right hand she gripped the netsuke and her jacket, both smeared with what looked like blood and something else—maybe little bits of flesh. She remembered what Shihong had told her when Faye had asked what her name meant in Chinese.

  “The whole world is red,” Shihong had told her.

  *

  When Faye got back to the hotel, she changed her reservation and packed. She stopped at the post office on her way to the airport and mailed a large package. Then she flew home to New York.

  9.

  After the first time, Faye would creep downstairs to the darkroom in the middle of the night when she was certain even her grandfather could not hear her. She had begun to wait for the nights when she had seen him take the little pill from the bottle in the kitchen on the shelf over the sink. She had learned to make the trip without her flashlight, so that even that weak whisper of light wouldn’t disturb her grandparents—although it was her grandfather she didn’t want to wake.

  She would go into the darkroom and close the door before she turned on the red light. The photographs were always the same: Women. Several at a time. The progression of the pictures was always the same—wounds to the face, smashing of the eyes, torn pieces from the lips, nose, cheeks, ears. There was always one with the frightened look who ended up tied on the bed in the room Faye didn’t recognize. But each new time she came down to look, now, there were more pieces on the bed. And this time, there was something new.

  It was the ninth photograph on the line. Faye wasn’t sure why she always counted the photographs, but she did. The ninth photograph had a woman in a chair at a table. She was wearing a dress and the skirt was pulled all the way up, to where her underwear should be. She had something over her eyes and something over her mouth and the thing over her mouth had a big dark spot on it. Her head was down, like she had fallen asleep at the table.

  She was tied to the chair at the ankles and her legs were open the way Faye’s grandmother told her never to sit. Where her underwear should be was a dark spot and that spot was on her dress right there, too. On the table was a plate and a fork and knife and a glass with something dark in it. The plate had something on it, too, but Faye wasn’t sure what it was.

  All the other pictures were of plates on the table and each one had something else on it, something Faye had never seen before. It all looked like meat, but not meat they ever ate here. The last photograph was back at the little room with the bed. The woman who had been sitting at the table was lying on the bed and her dress was ripped and there were pieces taken out of it all over. On the bed next to her were the plates, all of them with the things on them that looked like meat, but Faye wasn’t sure.

  She stared at the photos for a long time, going back and forth and looking at all of the things on the plates. Then she knew what it was she was looking at: the things on the plates were the things that were inside her operation doll. They were the organs—the heart, the liver, the kidneys, the intestines, some other things she didn’t think were inside the body in the operation doll.

  Faye looked at the photographs again. Then she turned off the light and shut the door. She went into the kitchen and sat down at the table. The light from the back porch was on and a small shaft of it came through the window onto the table, onto her pajama legs as she sat in the chair and thought about what she had just seen.

  She got up to go back to her bedroom. When she got to the door of the kitchen she turned and looked at the table and chair again. It was the same as the one in the photographs. Suddenly, Faye felt really hot and her he
art started to pound fast, like when she was scared. Then everything went dark as she fell to the floor.

  10.

  Another Christmas, three years after the arson fire and six months after Faye had taken the photographs of the children in the Central Valley, a young woman, distraught over a breakup and too upset to head home for the holiday, had thrown herself from the subway platform in front of the train. She’d been sliced nearly in half, yet remained alive beneath the train. Faye had been only a few blocks away, still at the newspaper, and gotten the call from the city desk to go down and see if she could get some shots. The city desk editor was always looking for the story that no one else had, and he and Faye got along really well because those were the stories she wanted, too. He always saw Pulitzer on everything and he’d say to her, “This has Pulitzer written all over it, if you’ve got the ’nads. Whaddaya think? Can ya do it?”

  He liked talking like that, like it was 1940 and she was WeeGee being sent down to take flashbulb shots of dead gangsters lying in the street in the meat-packing district with the kind of equipment her grandfather had once used, instead of the small Nikon with the SIM card that was even more like magic than everything that had been in her grandfather’s studio when she was growing up.

  So Faye had gone. In fact, because it was two days before Christmas and a Friday night, she’d been the only one around for the shots. The EMTs and firefighters who were cutting away at the train car above the woman wouldn’t let the TV crews down—too much equipment, too dangerous. But Faye, lean and lithe and agile enough to leap down onto the tracks without getting in anyone’s way, had been there with her little camera. She’d crawled down to chronicle what the woman thought—prayed—would be her final moments as rescuers worked above to free her. Faye had talked to her the whole time, talked while the whine of the torch and the crunch of the shears had cut and cut and cut around her and the woman, whose name was, in an irony too bald for Faye, Esperanza, told her the story of why she jumped in front of the train and how much she wanted to die.