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Chapter One
I stopped shooting people six months ago, just after I won the Pulitzer Prize. People were
always my gift, but they were wearing me down long before I won the prize. Still, I kept
shooting them, in some blind quest that I didn't even know I was on. It's hard to admit
that, but the Pulitzer was a different milestone for me than it is for most photographers.
You see, my father won it twice. The first time in 1966, for a series in McComb,
Mississippi. The second in 1972, for a shot on the Cambodian border. He never really got
that one. The prizewinning film was pulled from his camera by American marines on the
wrong side of the Mekong River. The camera was all they found. Twenty frames of Tri-X made
the sequence of events clear. Shooting his motor-drive Nikon F2 at five frames per second,
my dad recorded the brutal execution of a female prisoner by a Khmer Rouge soldier, then
captured the face of her executioner as the pistol was turned toward the brave but foolish
man pointing the camera at him. I was twelve years old and ten thousand miles away, but
that bullet struck me in the heart.
Jonathan Glass was a legend long before that day, but fame is no comfort to a lonely
child. I didn't see my father nearly enough when I was young, so following in his
footsteps has been one way for me to get to know him. I still carry his battle-scarred
Nikon in my bag. It's a dinosaur by today's standards, but I won my Pulitzer with it. He'd
probably joke about the sentimentality of my using his old camera, but I know what he'd
say about my winning the prize: Not bad, for a girl.
And then he'd hug me. God, I miss that hug. Like the embrace of a great bear, it swallowed
me completely, sheltered me from the world. I haven't felt those arms in twenty-eight
years, but they're as familiar as the smell of the sweet olive tree he planted outside my
window when I turned eight. I didn't think a tree was much of a birthday present back
then, but later, after he was gone, that hypnotic fragrance drifting through my open
window at night was like his spirit watching over me. It's been a long time since I slept
under that window.
For most photographers, winning the Pulitzer is a triumph of validation, a momentous
beginning, the point at which your telephone starts ringing with the job offers of your
dreams. For me it was a stopping point. I'd already won the Capa Award twice, which is the
one that matters to people who know. In 1936, Robert Capa shot the immortal photo of a
Spanish soldier at the instant a fatal bullet struck him, and his name is synonymous with
bravery under fire. Capa befriended my father as a young man in Europe, shortly after Capa
and Cartier-Bresson and two friends founded Magnum Photos. Three years later, in 1954,
Capa stepped on a land mine in what was then called French Indochina, and set a tragic
precedent that my father, Sean Flynn (Errol's reckless son), and about thirty other
American photographers would follow in one way or another during the three decades of
conflict known to the American public as the Vietnam War. But the public doesn't know or
care about the Capa Award. It's the Pulitzer they know, and that's what makes the winners
marketable.
After I won, new assignments poured in. I declined them all. I was thirty-nine years old,
unmarried (though not without offers), and I'd passed the mental state known as
"burned out" five years before I put that Pulitzer on my shelf. The reason was
simple. My job, reduced to its essentials, has been to chronicle death's grisly passage
through the world. Death can be natural, but I see it most often as a manifestation of
evil. And like other professionals who see this face of death-cops, soldiers, doctors,
priests-war photographers age more rapidly than normal people. The extra years don't
always show, but you feel them in the deep places, in the marrow and the heart. They weigh
you down in ways that few outside our small fraternity can understand. I say fraternity,
because few women do this job. It's not hard to guess why. As Dickey Chappelle, a woman
who photographed combat from World War II to Vietnam, once said: This is no place for the
feminine.
And yet it was none of this that finally made me stop. You can walk through a
corpse-littered battlefield and come upon an orphaned infant lying atop its dead mother
and not feel a fraction of what you will when you lose someone you love. Death has
punctuated my life with almost unbearable loss, and I hate it. Death is my mortal enemy.
Hubris, perhaps, but I come by that honestly. When my father turned his camera on that
murderous Khmer Rouge soldier, he must have known his life was forfeit. He shot the
picture anyway. He didn't make it out of Cambodia, but his picture did, and it went a long
way toward changing the mind of America about that war. All my life I lived by that
example, by my father's unwritten code. So no one was more shocked than I that, when death
crashed into my family yet again, the encounter shattered me.
I limped through seven months of work, had one spasm of creativity that won me the
Pulitzer, then collapsed in an airport. I was hospitalized for six days. The doctors
called it post-traumatic stress disorder. I asked them if they expected to be paid for
that diagnosis. My closest friends-and even my agent-told me point-blank that I had to
stop working for a while. I agreed. The problem was, I didn't know how. Put me on a beach
in Tahiti, and I am framing shots in my mind, probing the eyes of waiters or passersby,
looking for the life behind life. Sometimes I think I've actually become a camera, an
instrument for recording reality, that the exquisite machines I carry when I work are but
extensions of my mind and eye. For me there is no vacation. If my eyes are open, I'm
working.
Thankfully, a solution presented itself. Several New York editors had been after me for
years to do a book. They all wanted the same one: my war photographs. Backed into a corner
by my breakdown, I made a devil's bargain. In exchange for letting an editor at Viking do
an anthology of my war work, I accepted a double advance: one for that book, and one for
the book of my dreams. The book of my dreams has no people in it. No faces, anyway. Not
one pair of stunned or haunted eyes. Its working title is "Weather."
"Weather" was what took me to Hong Kong this week. I was there a few months ago
to shoot the monsoon as it rolled over one of the most tightly packed cities in the world.
I shot Victoria Harbor from the Peak and the Peak from Central, marveling at the different
ways rich and poor endured rains so heavy and unrelenting that they've driven many a
roundeye to drunkenness or worse. This time Hong Kong was only a way station to China
proper, though I scheduled two days there to round out my portfolio on the city. But on
the second day, my entire book project imploded. I had no warning, not one prescient
moment. That's the way the big things happen in your life.
A friend from Reuters had convinced me that I had to visit the Hong Kong Museum of Art, to
see some Chinese watercolors. He said the ancient Chinese painters had achieved an almost
perfect purity in their images of nature. I know nothing about art, but I figured the
paintings were worth a look, if only for some perspective. Boarding the venerable Star
Ferry in the late afternoon, I crossed the harbor to the Kowloon side and made my way on
foot to the museum. After twenty minutes inside, perspective was the last thing on my
mind.
The guard at the entrance was the first signpost, but I misread him completely. As I
walked through the door, his lips parted slightly, and the whites of his eyes grew in an
expression not unlike lust. I still cause that reaction in men on occasion, but I should
have paid more attention. In Hong Kong I am kwailo, a foreign devil, and my hair is not
blond, the color so prized by Chinese men.
Next was the tiny Chinese matron who rented me a Walkman, headphones, and the
English-language version of the museum's audio tour. She looked up smiling to hand me the
equipment; then her teeth disappeared and her face lost two shades of color. I
instinctively turned to see if some thug was standing behind me, but there was only me-all
five-feet-eight of me-thin and reasonably muscular but not much of a threat. When I asked
what was the matter, she shook her head and busied herself beneath her counter. I felt
like someone had just walked over my grave. I shook it off, put on the Walkman, and headed
for the exhibition rooms with a voice like Jeremy Irons's speaking sonorous yet precise
English in my headphones.
My Reuters friend was right. The watercolors floored me. Some were almost a thousand years
old, and hardly faded by the passage of time. The delicately brushed images somehow
communicated the smallness of human beings without alienating them from their environment.
The backgrounds weren't separated from the subjects, or perhaps there was no background;
maybe that was the lesson. As I moved among them, the internal darkness that is my
constant companion began to ease, the way it does when I listen to certain music. But the
respite was brief. While studying one particular painting-a man poling along a river in a
boat not unlike a Cajun pirogue-I noticed a Chinese woman standing to my left. Assuming
she was trying to view the painting, I slid a step to my right.
She didn't move. In my peripheral vision, I saw that she was not a visitor but a uniformed
cleaning woman with a feather dust mop. And it wasn't the painting she was staring at as
though frozen in space, but me. When I turned to face her, she blinked twice, then
scurried into the dark recesses of the adjoining room.
I moved on to the next watercolor, wondering why I should transfix her that way. I hadn't
spent much time on hair or makeup, but after checking my reflection in a display case, I
decided that nothing about my appearance justified a stare. I walked on to the next room,
this one containing works from the nineteenth century, but before I could absorb anything
about them, I found myself being stared at by another blue-uniformed museum guard. I felt
strangely sure that I'd been pointed out to him by the guard from the main entrance. His
eyes conveyed something between fascination and fear, and when he realized that I was
returning his gaze, he retreated behind the arch.
Fifteen years ago, I took this sort of attention for granted. Furtive stares and strange
approaches were standard fare in Eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union. But this was
post-handover Hong Kong, the twenty-first century. Thoroughly unsettled, I hurried through
the next few exhibition rooms with hardly a glance at the paintings. If I got lucky with a
cab, I could get back to the ferry and over to Happy Valley for some sunset shots before
my plane departed for Beijing. I turned down a short corridor lined with statuary, hoping
to find a shortcut back to the entrance. What I found instead was an exhibition room
filled with people.
Hesitating before the arched entrance, I wondered what had brought them there. The rest of
the museum was virtually deserted. Were the paintings in this room that much better than
the rest? Was there a social function going on? It didn't appear so. The visitors stood
silent and apart from one another, studying the paintings with eerie intensity. Posted
above the arch was a Lucite plaque with both Chinese pictographs and English letters. It
read: nude women in repose
Artist Unknown
When I looked back into the room, I realized it wasn't filled with
"people"-it was filled with men. Why men only? I'd stayed a week in Hong Kong on
my last visit, and I hadn't noticed a shortage of nudity, if that was what they were
looking for. Every man in the room was Chinese, and every one wore a business suit. I had
the impression that each had been compelled to jump up from his desk at work, run down to
his car, and race over to the museum to look at these paintings. Reaching down to the
Walkman on the waistband of my jeans, I fast-forwarded until I came to a description of
the room before me.
"Nude Women in Repose," announced the voice in my headset. "This
provocative exhibit contains seven canvases by the unknown artist responsible for the
group of paintings known popularly as the 'Sleeping Women' series. The Sleeping Women are
a mystery in the world of modern art. Nineteen paintings are known to exist, all oil on
canvas, the first coming onto the market in 1999. Over the course of the nineteen
paintings, a progression from vague Impressionism to startling Realism occurs, with the
most recent works almost photographic in their accuracy. Though all the paintings were
originally believed to depict sleeping women in the nude, this theory is now in question.
The early paintings are so abstract that the question cannot be settled with certainty,
but it is the later canvases that have created a sensation among Asian collectors, who
believe the paintings depict women not in sleep but in death. For this reason, the curator
has titled the exhibit 'Nude Women in Repose' rather than 'Sleeping Women.' The four
paintings that have come onto the market in the past six months have commanded record
prices. The last offering, titled simply Number Nineteen, sold to Japanese businessman
Hodai Takagi for one point two million pounds sterling. The Museum is deeply indebted to
Mr. Takagi for lending three canvases to the current exhibit. As for the artist, his
identity remains unknown. His work is available exclusively through Christopher Wingate,
LLC, of New York City, USA."
I felt a surprising amount of anxiety standing on the threshold of that roomful of men,
silent Asians posed like statues before images I could not yet see. Nude women sleeping,
possibly dead. I've seen more dead women than most coroners, many of them naked, their
clothes blasted away by artillery shells, burned off by fire, or torn away by soldiers.
I've shot hundreds of pictures of their corpses, methodically creating my own images of
death. Yet the idea of the paintings in the next room disturbed me. I had created my death
images to expose atrocities, to try to stop senseless slaughter. The artist behind the
paintings in the next room, I sensed, had some other agenda.
I took a deep breath and went in.
My arrival caused a ripple among the men, like a new species of fish swimming into a
school. A woman-especially a roundeye woman-clearly made them uncomfortable, as though
they were ashamed of their presence in this room. I met their fugitive glances with a
level gaze and walked up to the painting with the fewest men in front of it.
After the soothing Chinese watercolors, it was a shock. The painting was quintessentially
Western, a portrait of a nude woman in a bathtub. A roundeye woman like me, but ten years
younger. Maybe thirty. Her pose-one arm hanging languidly over the edge of the
tub-reminded me of the Death of Marat, which I knew only from the Masterpiece board game
I'd played as a child. But the view was from a higher angle, so that her breasts and pubis
were visible. Her eyes were closed, and though they communicated an undeniable peace, I
couldn't tell whether it was the peace of sleep or of death. The skin color was not quite
natural, more like marble, giving me the chilling feeling that if I could reach into the
painting and turn her over, I would find her back purple with pooled blood.
Sensing the men close behind me edging closer, I moved to the next painting. In it, the
female subject lay on a bed of brown straw spread on planks, as though on a threshing
floor. Her eyes were open and had the dull sheen I had seen in too many makeshift morgues
and hastily dug graves. There was no question about this one; she was supposed to look
dead. That didn't mean she was dead, but whoever had painted her knew what death looked
like.
Again I heard men behind me. Shuffling feet, hissing silk, irregular respiration. Were
they trying to gauge my reaction to this Occidental woman in the most vulnerable state a
woman can be in? Although if she was dead, she was technically invulnerable. Yet this
gawking at her corpse by strangers seemed somehow a final insult, an ultimate humiliation.
We cover corpses for the same reason we go behind walls to carry out our bodily functions;
some human states cry out for privacy, and being dead is one of them. Respect above all is
called for, not for the body, but for the person who recently departed it.
Someone paid two million dollars for a painting like this one. Maybe even for this one. A
man paid that, of course. A woman would have bought this painting only to destroy it.
Ninety-nine out of a hundred women, anyway. I closed my eyes and said a prayer for the
woman in the picture, on the chance that she was real. Then I moved on.
The next painting hung beyond a small bench set against the wall. It was smaller than the
others, perhaps two feet by three, with the long axis vertical. Two men stood before it,
but they weren't looking at the canvas. They gaped like clubbed mackerel as I approached,
and I imagined that if I pulled down their starched white collars, I would find gills. No
taller than I, they backed quickly out of my way and cleared the space before the
painting. As I turned toward it, a premonitory wave of heat flashed across my neck and
shoulders, and I felt the dry itch of the past rubbing against the present.
This woman was naked as well. She sat in a window seat, her head and one shoulder leaned
against the casement, her skin lighted by the violet glow of dawn or dusk. Her eyes were
half open, but they looked more like the glass eyes of a doll than those of a living
woman. Her body was thin and muscular, her hands lay in her lap, and her Victorian-style
hair fell upon her shoulders like a dark veil. Though she had been sitting face-on to me
from the moment I looked at the canvas, I suddenly had the terrifying sensation that she
had turned to me and spoken aloud. The taste of old metal filled my mouth, and my heart
ballooned in my chest. This was not a painting but a mirror. The face looking back at me
from the wall was my own. The body, too, mine: my feet, hips, breasts, my shoulders and
neck. But the eyes were what held me, the dead eyes-held me and then dropped me through
the floor into a nightmare I had traveled ten thousand miles to escape. A harsh burst of
Chinese echoed through the room, but it was gibberish to me. My throat spasmed shut, and I
could not scream or even breathe.
Excerpted from DEAD SLEEP © Copyright 2005 by Greg Iles. Reprinted with permission by Signet Pub. Group, an imprint of Penguin Signet. All rights reserved.
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