Dead Sleep

So it was at the museum. But here, in the familiar environment of the plane, in the warm wake of my third scotch, things begin to return. Brief flashing images at first, then jerky sequences, like bad streaming video. I’m standing before the painting of a naked woman whose face is mine to the last detail, and my feet are rooted to the floor with the permanence of nightmares. The men crowding me from behind believe I’m the woman who modeled for the painting on the wall. They chatter incessantly and race around like ants after kerosene has been poured on their hill. They are puzzled that I am alive, angry that their fantasy of “Sleeping Women” seems to be a hoax. But I know things they don’t. I see my sister stepping out onto St. Charles Avenue, the humidity condensing on her skin even before she begins to run. Three miles is her goal, but somewhere in the junglelike Garden District, she puts a foot wrong and falls into the hole my father fell into in 1972.

Now she stares back at me with vacant eyes, from a canvas as deep as a window into Hell. Having accepted her death in my bones, having mourned and buried her in my mind, this unexpected resurrection triggers a storm of emotions. But somewhere in the chemical chaos of my brain, in the storm’s dark eye, my rational mind continues to work. Whoever painted this picture has knowledge of my sister beyond the moment she vanished from the Garden District. He knows what no one else could: the story of Jane’s last hours, or minutes, or seconds. He heard her last words. He – He…? Why do I assume the painter is a man?

Because he almost certainly is. I have no patience with the Naomi Wolfs of the world, but there’s no denying statistical fact. It is men who commit these obscene crimes: rape; stranger murder; and the piece de resistance, serial murder. It’s an exclusively male pathology: the hunting, the pla

As I stare into my sister’s painted eyes, a wild hope is born in my chest. Jane looks dead in the picture. And the audio tour a

A particularly loud burst of Chinese snaps the spell of the picture, waking me to the tears growing cold on my cheeks, the hand grasping my shoulder. That hand belongs to one of the bastards who came here today to ogle dead women. I have a wild urge to reach up and snatch the canvas from the wall, to cover my sister’s nakedness from these prying eyes. But if I pull down a painting worth millions of dollars, I will find myself in the custody of the Chinese police – a disagreeable circumstance at best.

I run instead.

I run like hell, and I don’t stop until I reach a dark room filled with documents under glass. It’s ancient Chinese poetry, hand-painted on paper as fragile as moths’ wings. The only light comes from the display cases, and they fluoresce only when I come near. My hands are shaking in the dark, and when I hug myself, I realize the rest of me is shaking too. In the blackness I see my mother, slowly drinking herself to death in Oxford, Mississippi. I see Jane’s husband and children in New Orleans, trying their best to live without her and not doing terribly well at it. I see the FBI agents I met thirteen months ago, sober men with good intentions but no idea how to help.

I shot hundreds of crime-scene photos when I was starting my career, but I never quite realized how important a dead body is to a murder investigation. The corpse is ground zero. Without one, investigators face a wall as blank as unexposed film. The painting back in the exhibition room is not Jane’s corpse, but it may be the closest thing anyone will ever find to it. It’s a starting point. With this realization comes another: there are other paintings like Jane’s. According to the audio tour, nineteen. Nineteen naked women posed in images of sleep or death. As far as I know, only eleven women have disappeared from New Orleans. Who are the other eight? Or are there only eleven, with some appearing in more than one painting? And what in God’s name are they doing in Hong Kong, halfway around the world?

Stop! snaps a voice in my head. My father’s voice. Forget your questions! What should you do NOW?

The audio tour said the paintings are sold through a U.S. dealer named Christopher something in New York. Windham? Winwood? Wingate. To be sure, I pull the Walkman off my belt and jam it into my crowded fa

Move! orders my father’s voice. While they’re still confused.

Retracing my steps to the exhibition room is easy; I simply follow the babble of conversation echoing through the empty halls. The men are still milling around, talking about me, no doubt, the Sleeping Woman who isn’t sleeping and certainly isn’t dead. I feel no fear as I approach them. Somewhere between the document room and this place labeled “Nude Women in Repose,” I shoved my sister into a dark memory hole and became the woman who has covered wars on four continents – my father’s daughter.

With my sudden reappearance, the Chinese draw together in excited knots. A museum guard is questioning two of them, trying to find out what happened. I walk brazenly past him and shoot two pictures of the woman in the bathtub. The flash of the little Canon sets off a blast of irate Chinese. Moving quickly through the room, I shoot two more paintings before the guard gets a hand on my arm. I turn to him and nod as though I understand, then break away toward the painting of Jane. I get off one shot before he blows his whistle for help and locks onto my arm again, this time with both hands.

Sometimes you can b.s. your way out of situations like this. This is not one of those times. If I’m still standing here when Someone In Authority arrives, I’ll never get out of the museum with my film. I double the guard over with a well-placed knee and run like hell for the second time.

The police whistle sounds again, though this time with a faint bleat. I skid to a stop on the waxed floor, backpedal to a fire door, and crash through to the outside, leaving a wake of alarms behind me. For the first time I’m glad for the teeming crowds of Hong Kong; even a roundeye woman can disappear in less than a minute. Three hundred yards from the museum, I hail a taxi and order him not to the Star Ferry, which someone might remember me boarding, but through the tu

Back on the Hong Kong side, we race to my hotel. I’m staying at the Mandarin, which is too expensive for me but has great sentimental value. As a child, I received several letters from my father on its stationery. Inside my room, I throw my clothes into my suitcase, pack my cameras into their aluminum flight cases, and take a different cab to the new airport. I intend to be out of Chinese airspace before some enterprising cop figures out that, while they may not have my name, they have a perfect likeness of my face on their museum wall. They could have flyers at the airport and the hotels in less than an hour. I’m not sure why they would – I’ve committed no crime, other than stealing a Walkman -but I’ve been arrested for less before, and in the paranoid world of the Hong Kong Chinese, my behavior around multimillion-dollar paintings would make me an excellent candidate for “temporary detention.”