Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

Only it turned out to be the exit into Bangkok Park. And the next thing either one of them knows, they’re barely rolling their Country Squire station wagon down the east end of Goulden Avenue. And the noise they’re making is calling attention to them. Every hooker and pimp and dealer is squinting to see what kind of monster has invaded their sleazy quiet. And Sylvia just lay there in the back of the wagon, staring out at all the neon and all these strange faces, these exaggerated circus faces.

And at some point, Ma turned a corner. And the car seized up for a minute. Or maybe it was just Sylvia’s imagination. But in that instant, she looked out at this woman, this prostitute, this girl who was probably younger than Sylvia is now. And they stared at each other. They each took it all in under the spot from the corner street lamp. The hooker had red permed hair. And this strange peach-colored knit dress. And a purple ring around her left eye. A big, ugly, black-and-blue welt orbiting the whole of her eye and seeming to make the eyeball itself bulge slightly.

Then Sylvia and the hooker were separated. And Ma forced the Ford out of Bangkok and into what’s now called the Canal Zone. The wagon died maybe four blocks from Sylvia’s vision. They left it there, unlocked, and took one of the last buses home. And Mother wept on the bus. She never made a sound and Sylvia saw her trying to bite on her lips to stop, but the tears slid down her face anyway. She never wiped them away and her daughter didn’t move to touch her.

When they got home, neither of them turned on a light. Sylvia got undressed and climbed into bed and Ma walked over to her and just touched her forehead and said I promise it will be all right. Sylvia didn’t know what the woman was talking about and was close to terrified, probably because it was the first time she’d seen Ma lose her grip. It was also the last time. Years later, Sylvia remembered thinking about that night and realized they must have been in real trouble moneywise. But right now, she doesn’t think money had much to do with her mother’s promise.

About a week later Ma found a job in a bakery. Sylvia doesn’t know what happened to the Country Squire. But the vision of that prostitute — the red hair and the purple eye and an instantaneous look that said she lived someplace past desperation — it held onto Sylvia like a religious apparition. She can see the hooker now. She can call her up. The hooker is a personal icon. A definition of knowledge that Sylvia doesn’t want to have. The sight of her face was like a hammer to the head. A terrible epiphany that said there are worlds you can’t even imagine yet and things can always get worse.

Sylvia has driven through Bangkok a couple times in the past few years. Always during the day and never stopping. It’s still an unsettling experience. It should be a photographer’s paradise. There was a rumor in the Zone about some midwesterner just out of design school who got a grant to go in there with his Minolta. Something about doing a big coffee table book on graffiti. The rumor said, of course, the guy never came out, that a week after he disappeared a roll of film got mailed to the Spy. And when they processed it they had thirty-six shots of a torture ballet: The photographer stripped naked. The photographer hanging a foot off the ground, handcuffed to water pipes in an empty factory loft. The photographer toasted like a marshmallow, jet-flamed with a welder’s acetylene torch.

Sylvia pulls her notepad from her jacket pocket and checks the address. She moves down the street trying to position herself but none of the storefronts show numbers. She walks past two hookers in front of Poligny Discount Liquors and one of them quotes her a price in this throaty singsong whisper. She moves by Jeannie B’s Imposter Club, Buquet’s Grille, and Krause & Company, all of them seeming to be in a kind of middle state between operational and out-of-business. The storefronts all date from around the 1930s and their names are uniformly announced above display windows in half-lit, cursive neon, mainly green and rosy-pink. A hand-lettered sign in Buquet’s reads Back at 2:30. Whatever products Krause & Company traffic in will be a mystery forever — the front window is empty and covered with two ragged pieces of white, bandage-like tape formed into an X as if the proprietors secured the store for a hurricane and then left forever.

She turns a corner and is shaken to see the huge and frozen face of Jenny Ellis, the missing girl, staring down at her from a billboard atop some generic mill. It’s a close-up, Jenny’s grinning, unaware face caught in surprise, the eyes wide and blue, the thin blonde hair parted in the middle and hanging down close to the shoulders. The billboard reads

Have You Seen This Child?

Jenny Ellis was last seen on October 1

leaving the schoolyard of Ste. Jeanne d’Arc Elementary School

She was wearing a green plaid jumper with white blouse

She is 10 years old, 4 ft. 6 in. tall, 65 lbs.

blonde hair, blue eyes, slight overbite

If you have any information concerning the whereabouts of

Jenny Ellis please

call 1-800-FIND-JEN

Reward Offered

Sylvia would like to avoid looking at it, but her eyes are inevitably drawn upward each time she passes one of these signs and she can’t help staring into this little girl’s face, backed by the hyper-clear autumn sky, the child’s eyes looking down on the city, displaying the innocence of her years.

So far, at least according to the local press, there isn’t a single indication of what happened to Jenny Ellis. It’s as if she walked a block away from her grade school and then was assumed bodily into the clouds.

Sylvia breaks eye contact, moves on, speeding up her pace, and at the end of the block, sharing a dividing wall with Brody’s Adult Books, she finds Jack Derry’s. In the window are cardboard displays for cameras that Kodak stopped making when she was a kid. The people in the ads are dressed in wildly outdated swimsuits and there’s a caption that reads Save that vacation forever! The door of the place is covered with metal bars, but a plastic Open sign is hanging from the doorknob.

She steps inside and her first impression is that Perry was right. She’s made a mistake coming down here. The place is a disaster. The walls are fitted with a cheesy old rumpus-room kind of paneling, only it hasn’t been cut right and different sections fail to cover the gouged plaster walls underneath. The floor is covered with a scarlet shag carpet that looks like it’s never been vacuumed. Heads of stubbed-out cigarettes and faded candy wrappers are everywhere. There’s a drop ceiling that’s missing half a dozen tiles and the ones that remain are either mismatched or display huge brown water stains. The plywood counter looks like it could tumble with a touch and behind it there’s a wall of metal shelving loaded to bursting with a ridiculous assortment of camera equipment. Nothing is even close to being organized. Boxes of film are everywhere. Camera parts and lenses, straps and cases are piled on the shelves and on the floor behind the counter. And there’s a blanket of heavy dust coating it all. The place has a stale, smoky odor. The lighting is yellow and dim.

“We’re closed,” comes a yell from a back room.

“The door was open,” Sylvia calls back.

There’s no response and she starts to think about leaving when the burlap curtain covering the back doorway is pulled open and a tall, emaciated man steps forward with his huge hands covering his eyes, his fingers and thumbs massaging the sides of his temple.

Finally, he removes his hand and stares at her, takes a labored breath and says, “Forgot to lock the door,” nodding his head too fast.