Brian Pham

Spouse of Crystal Faulkner Delacroix, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Brian Pham keeps a logbook, and in twenty years of nights he has never left a line blank. He was born in 1986 in New Orleans (Garden District), Louisiana, and is living today in the same part of the city, where he works as a security guard on the night rounds of a hospital campus and, before that, of the courthouse on Tulane Avenue. He was not born to any house of the Ledger and is entered in the family papers as unaffiliated, but in 2006 he married the court clerk Crystal Faulkner Delacroix, the younger daughter of the slayers Felix Delacroix and Lorraine Trahan Faulkner, and so stands at the edge of the Faulkner bloodline, the Lancastrian line that keeps the Red Ledger and descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486. They have one daughter, Angela Faulkner Pham, born in 2008, who has not been called. He is not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, and he has no alias, archetype, craft or gear beyond a torch, a radio and a pair of good shoes. The Faulkners say of him that he is the man who is awake when the rest of the house is asleep, and who has been in the Ledger since the day that he first brought a woman a cup of coffee. He was born in a house on a street of oaks in the Garden District, the only son of parents whom the family papers do not name, as the Ledger does when a family asks to be left out of the book. His father drove a delivery van for a restaurant supplier and his mother kept the accounts of a small grocery on Magazine Street, and the household, which lived over the shop, was a Vietnamese-American one in a district of old and silent money. It was a house of early mornings. His father was up at four to load, and his mother at five to count the till, and the boy, who was a quick, careful, rather solemn child, was out of bed at six to help sort the crates, for which he was paid in oranges. He learned the first thing that he knew about a street at that hour, which is that it has a shape at night that it does not have by day. A van went by at a quarter to five. A cat sat on a wall. A light was always on in the same upstairs window of the same large house, and if it was not, somebody noticed. He was good at noticing, and not at much else, as he tells it. His teachers at the parish school thought him a slow boy, because he took a long time to answer, and his father knew better, because the boy, on being asked how many crates were on the van, would say seventy-one, and be right. At sixteen he took a weekend job as a night watchman at a warehouse on the river, where he sat in a hut with a flask and a radio and learned to hold still, which is more difficult than it sounds. He was seventeen when he was first given a uniform. He walked the Garden District in it, in the first summer, on a part-time round for a firm that watched the big houses on the avenues, in a peaked cap that did not fit, and he got to know the whole of the neighbourhood after dark, every gate, every dog and every lamp. He says that it was like learning a language that nobody else was speaking. In August 2005 the hurricane came. He was nineteen. His family drove to Houston on the Sunday, in the van, with three generations and a rice cooker, and he stayed behind, in the uniform, on the night shift of the firm that watched the avenues, because somebody had to see that the houses were not looted, and because nobody had told him that he need not. He walked his round through the storm and the week after, in thigh boots, past the water that stood in the streets in Gentilly and the Lower Garden District but did not, for the most part, rise in the high ground of the avenues. He found a number of things that he did not understand, and he wrote them in his book. In the third week, in the first light, he saw a man in an expensive coat standing perfectly still on the neutral ground at the end of Prytania Street, in a flood, who was dry from the knees up. He wrote down the time. He wrote that the man did not move. He wrote that when he put the torch on him, the man smiled, and went away without a splash. He did not know what he had seen, and he put the book in the drawer. He met Crystal Faulkner Delacroix that autumn, when he was posted by the same firm to guard the criminal courthouse on Tulane Avenue, which had stood in a basement of water for a month and had no power, no heat and no staff but a few clerks in respirators who were pulling the dockets out of the mud. He sat in the lobby in a coat with a torch. At about eleven on the first night a small, quick, dark-eyed young woman in boots went by with a hand truck full of wet paper, and told him that he was in the way. He moved. He brought her a cup of coffee on a Styrofoam tray at midnight, and another the next night, and on the third he asked what she was doing with the paper, and she told him, in a rapid, exact voice, for ten minutes. He said that he had never met anybody who talked so well about files. She said that he had never met anybody who talked. They were married in 2006, in the church at Algiers, when he was twenty and she twenty-two, in front of two hundred Delacroix and Faulkner cousins, with his own mother in a silk jacket in the front pew, a little overcome, and his father, who had never seen so many people eat so much. He was told the truth on the second Sunday of the courtship by his future mother-in-law Lorraine, on her porch, in fewer words than anybody before or since, and was asked whether he would care for a pork chop. He took the pork chop. He then opened his logbook and showed her a page from the September before, with a time, a place and a man in an expensive coat, and Lorraine put down her fork and said that she would like to read the rest. She read the lot, at the kitchen table, in an hour, and found in the notebook of a nineteen-year-old guard six separate sightings that the Ledger had never had. She told him that he was not to try to do anything about them. He said that he had never thought of it. She said that she knew, and that this was why she was telling him. That is his service to the Ledger, and it is a considerable one. A guard sees the same doors every night for years and knows, as no hunter can, what is wrong. He knows the lamp that has gone out, the car that has been parked three nights, the visitor who does not sign the book and the night when the porch cat will not go near a certain gate. He has never carried more than a radio. He has rung his mother-in-law, from a car park or a stairwell, on perhaps forty nights in twenty years, to say a time and a place, and he has then gone back inside and locked the door. The Ledger's Louisiana chapter, which does not much like to put it in writing, says that more hunters have gone to the right door on the right night because of the logbook of Brian Pham than because of any Delacroix craft. Angela Faulkner Pham was born in 2008, a quiet child who looked at a thing for a long time before she said what it was, and who at seven could say how many crates were on a van. He has taught her to hold still. In the pandemic years he worked the night rounds of a hospital campus that had closed its doors to all but the sick, and he walked the empty corridors, in a mask, with a thermos, and did not mind it, as he had been alone in the dark since he was seventeen. His wife, who was home, said that he had been practising for it all his life. He lives now in a house in the Garden District, not a quarter of a mile from the one that he was born in, with Crystal, Angela and a very old dog. He is a tall, slow-spoken man of forty with a grey streak in his hair and the habit of looking up at lit windows. He has filled thirty-one logbooks, which he keeps in a cedar chest. Brian Pham is remembered in the Faulkner family as the night guard of the Garden District, the unaffiliated husband who wrote down every light that should not have been lit and handed the book to the hunters. In the Slayerverse he stands for the watchmen and doorkeepers of the Red Ledger, who never took the field and who knew that to be awake at the right hour, and to write it down, is a service as old as the Ledger itself.