Paper Lantern

by Stuart Dybek

  He’s out of control, we’re watching slo-mo suicide, Clair said, enlisting me in a small group of theater people for an intervention. It was an era in New York when the craze for interventions seemed in direct proportion to the sale of coke. Emil regarded interventions as a form of theater below contempt. To avoid his suspicion, Clair planned for it to take place at the private cast party following the opening of the show Emil had worked obsessively over—a takeoff on The Elixir of Love.

  In the Donizetti opera, Dr. Dulcamara, a salesman of quack remedies, arrives in a small Basque town and encounters Nemorino, who requests a potion of the kind that Tristan used to win Isolde. Dulcamara sells him an elixir that’s nothing more than wine.

  In Emil’s script, the town is Winesburg, Ohio, an all-American community of secret lusts and repressed passion. The townsfolk sing of their need for a potion to release them from lives of quiet desperation. Emil played the traveling salesman—not Dr. Dulcamara, but Willy Loman. As Willy sings his aria “Placebo,” sexually explicit ads for merchandise flash across a screen, attracting the townsfolk. They mob Nemorino, and the bottle of bogus elixir is torn from hand to hand. Its mere touch has them writhing lewdly, unbuttoning their clothes, and when the bottle breaks they try to lap elixir from the stage, pleading for more, threatening to hang Willy Loman by his tie if he doesn’t deliver.

  Willy finds a wine bottle beside a drunk, comatose and sprawled against a dumpster. As scripted, the bottle is half filled with wine, and Emil is only to simulate urinating into it. But that night, onstage, he drained the bottle, unzipped his trousers, and, in view of the audience, pissed.

  “Here’s your elixir of love!” he shouted, raising the bottle triumphantly as he stepped back into the town square.

  The script has the townsfolk passing the elixir, slugging it down, and falling madly, indiscriminately in love. Willy demands to be paid, and they rough him up instead. The play was to end with the battered salesman suffering a heart attack as an orgy swirls around him. In an aria sung with his dying breath, he wonders if he’s spent his moneygrubbing life unwittingly pissing away magic.

  Script notwithstanding, opening night was pure improv, pure pandemonium. When the actors realized Emil had actually given them piss to drink, the beating they gave him in return wasn’t simulated, either. Emil fought back until, struck with the bottle, he spit out pieces of tooth, then leaped from the stage, ran down the center aisle, and out of the theater. The audience thought it was the best part of the show.

  The cast party went on backstage without Emil. Stunned and dejected, the actors knew it was the end of Cahoots and on that final evening clung to each other’s company. Around midnight, Clair pressed me into a corner to say, You don’t belong at this wake. We stood kissing, and then she gently pushed me away and whispered, Go. One word, perfectly timed to say what we had avoided saying aloud, but both knew: whatever was between us had run its course. Instead of goodbye, I said what I’d told her after our first night together and had repeated like an incantation each time since: Thank you.

  Emil showed up as I was leaving. He still wore his bloodied salesman’s tie. His swollen lip could have used stitches, but he managed to swig from a bottle of vodka.

  Drunk on your own piss? asked Glen, who’d played Nemorino and had thrown the first punch onstage.

  Shhh, no need for more, Clair said. She took Emil’s arm as if to guide him. Sit down with us, she told him. Emil shook off her hand. Judas, he said, and Clair recoiled as if stung.

  Keeping a choke hold on the bottle, Emil climbed up on a chair.

  I’ve come to say I’m sorry, he announced, and to resign as your artistic director. I guessed you all might still be hanging around, given that without Cahoots none of you has anywhere else to perform.

  Clair, blotting her smeared makeup, began to sob quietly, hopelessly, as a child cries. Emil continued as if, like so much else between them, it were a duet. Sweat streaked his forehead as it did when he sang.

  Did you think I didn’t know about the pathetic little drama you’d planned for me tonight by way of celebration? he asked. So, yes, I’m sorry, sorry to deprive you of the cheesy thrill of your judgmental psycho-dabbling. But then what better than your dabbling as actors to prepare you to dabble in others’ lives? Was it so threatening to encounter someone willing to risk it all, working without a net, living an opera as if it’s life, which sometimes—tonight, for instance—apparently means being condemned to live life as if it’s a fucking opera?

  * * *

  The last friend of mine to say he was living life like an opera was Cole.

  He said it during a call to wish me a happy birthday, one of those confiding phone conversations we’d have after being out of touch—not unusual for a friendship that went back decades to when we were in high school. Twenty years earlier, Cole had beat me in the state finals, setting a high school record for the high hurdles. We were workout buddies the summer between high school and college, which was also the summer I worked downtown at a vintage jazz record shop. Cole would stop by to spin records while I closed up. He’d been named for Coleman Hawkins and could play Hawkins’s famous tenor solo from “Body and Soul” note for note on the piano. Cole played the organ each Sunday at the Light of Deliverance, one of the oldest African-American churches on the South Side. His grandfather was the minister. I’d close the record shop and we’d jog through downtown to a park with a track beside the lake, and after running, we’d swim while the lights of the Gold Coast replaced a lingering dusk. His grandfather owned a cabin on Deep Lake in northern Michigan, and Cole invited me up to fish before he left for Temple on a track scholarship. It was the first of our many fishing trips over the years to come.

  Cole lived in Detroit now, near the neighborhood of the ’67 riots, where he’d helped establish the charter school that he’d written a book about. He’d spent the last four years as a community organizer and was preparing to run for public office. When he’d married Amina, a Liberian professor who had sought political asylum, “Body and Soul” was woven into the recitation of their vows. The wedding party wore dashikis, including me, the only white groomsman.

  He called on my birthday—our birthdays were days apart—to invite me up to Deep Lake to fish one last time. His grandfather had died years earlier and the family had decided to sell the cabin. When I asked how things were going, Cole paused, then said, I’m living my life like an opera. I knew he was speaking in code, something so uncharacteristic of him that it caught me by surprise. I waited for him to elaborate. Before the silence got embarrassing, he changed the subject.

  We’d always fished after Labor Day when the summer people were gone. By then evenings were cool enough for a jacket. The woods ringing the lake were already rusting, the other cottages shuttered, the silence audible. Outboard engines were prohibited on Deep Lake, although the small trolling motor on the minister’s old wooden rowboat was legal. Cole fished walleye as his grandfather had taught: at night—some nights under a spangle of Milky Way, on others in the path of the moon, but also on nights so dark that out on the middle of the lake you could lose your sense of direction.

  The night was dark like that. There was no dock light to guide us back, but the tubed stereo that had belonged to his grandfather glowed on the screened porch. Cole’s grandfather had had theories about fishing and music: one was that walleyes rose to saxophones. His jazz collection was still there, some of the same albums I’d sold in the record shop when I was eighteen. We chose Ballads by Ben Webster. The notes slurred across the water as I rowed out to the deep spot in the middle. Cole lowered the anchor, though it couldn’t touch bottom. I cracked the seal on a fifth of Jameson and passed it to Cole; tradition demanded that I arrive with a bottle. We’d had a lot of conversations over the years, waiting for the fish to bite.

  I been staying at the cabin since we last talked, Cole said.

  What’s going on? I asked.

  Remember I told you I was living life like an opera? You didn
’t say boo, but I figured you got my meaning, seeing you’d used the phrase yourself. Never know who’s listening in. Cole laughed as if kidding, but, given the surveillance on Martin Luther King, Jr., he worried about wiretaps.

  Cole, I said, I never used that phrase.

  Where do you think I got it? he asked.

  Not from me.

  Maybe you forgot saying it, he said, maybe you finally forgot who you said it about. Anyway, whoever said it, I’m at a fund-raiser in Ann Arbor, everyone dressed so they can wear running shoes except for a woman I can’t help noticing. You know me, it’s not like I’m looking—just the opposite—there’s always someone on the make if you’re looking. She’s out of Vogue. I hate misogynist rap, man, but plead guilty to thinking: rich bitch—which I regret when she comes up with my book and a serious camera that can’t hide something vulnerable about her. Photojournalist, her card reads, and could she take one of me signing my book, and I say, sure, if she promises not to steal my soul, and she smiles and asks if she can make a donation to the school, and how could she get involved beyond just giving money, and where’s my next talk, and do I have time for a drink? Two weeks later at a conference in D.C. she’s there with Wizards tickets. And this time I go—we go to the game. In Boston it’s the symphony, in Philly I show her places I lived in college and take her to the Clef, where ’Trane played, and in New York we go to the Met. I’d never been to an opera; we go three nights in a row. Was I happy—happiness isn’t even the question. Remember running a race—thirteen-point-seven-nine seconds you’ve lived for, and when the gun finally fires and you’re running, you disappear—like playing music those few times when you’re more the music than you? She could make that happen again. One night, I’m home working late, Mina’s already asleep, and the phone in my office rings. I’d never given her that unlisted home number. You need to help me, she says, and the line goes dead. Phone rings again. Where are you? I ask. Trapped in a car at the edge, she says. Her calls keep getting dropped, her voice is slurred: Come get me before I’m washed away. I keep asking her, Where are you? Finally she says: Jupiter Beach—I drove to see the hurricane. I say, You’re a thousand miles away. The phone goes dead, rings, and Mina asks, Who keeps calling this time of night? She’s in her nightgown, leaning in the doorway for I don’t know how long. Too long for lies. I answer the phone, but no one’s there.

  She have a husband? Mina asks. You got to call him now.

  The business card from Ann Arbor has private numbers she listed on the back, one with a Florida area code. A man answers, gives his name. I say, You don’t know me, but I’m calling about an emergency, your wife’s in the storm in a car somewhere on Jupiter Beach.

  I know you, he says. I know you only too well. Don’t worry, she doesn’t tell me names, I don’t ask, but I know you.

  Mina presses speakerphone.

  You teach tango or Mandarin or yoga or murderers to write poetry, film the accounts of torture victims, rescue greyhounds. I know the things you do, the righteous things you say, and I know you couldn’t take your eyes off her the first time you saw her, and how that made you realize you’d been living a life in which you’d learned to look away. And like a miracle she’s looking back, and you wonder what’s the scent of a woman like that, and not long after—everything’s happening so fast—you ask, What do you want? and she says, To leave the world behind together, and you think beauty like hers must come with the magic to allow what you couldn’t ordinarily do, places you couldn’t go, a life you’d dreamed when you were young. But now, just as suddenly, she can destroy you by falling from the ledge she’s calling from, or falling asleep forever in the hotel room where she’s lost count of the pills. She’s talking crazy since she’s stopped taking the meds you never noticed, and when she said she loved you, that was craziness, too—you’re a symptom of her illness. So you called me, not to save her, but yourself, and it’s me who knows where she goes when she gets like this, and I’ll go, as I do every time, to save her, calm and comfort her, bring her home, because I love her, I was born to, I’ll always love her, and you’re only a shadow. I’ve learned to ignore shadows. She made you feel alive; now you’re a ghost. Go. Don’t call again.

  I told you on the phone, Cole said, that I was living my life like an opera, but he’s the one who sang the aria.

  * * *

  FIRE!

  A borrowed flat above a plumbing store whose back windows look out on a yard of stockpiled toilets filled with unflushed rain. Four a.m., still a little drunk from a wake at an Irish bar, they smell bread baking. Someone’s in the room, she whispers. It’s only the mirror, he tells her. She strips off her slip, tosses it over the shadowy reflection, and then follows the scent to the open front windows. A ghost, she says as if sighing. Below a vaporous streetlamp, in the doorway of a darkened bakery, a baker in white, hair and skin dusted with flour, leans smoking.

  FIRE!

  A bedroom lit by fireflies, one phosphorescent above the bed, another blinking in the mirror as if captured in a jar. The window open on the scent of rain-bearded lilacs. When the shards of a wind chime suspended in a corner tingle, it means a bat swoops through the dark. Flick on the bed lamp and the bat will vanish.

  FIRE! DAMN YOU! FIRE!

  Whom to identify with at this moment—who is more real—Caruso, whose unmistakable, ghostly, 78-rpm voice carries over the ramparts where sparrows twitter, or Mario Cavaradossi?

  Or perhaps with an extra in the firing squad, who—once Tosca flings herself from the parapet—will be free to march off for a beer at the bar around the corner, and why not, he was only following the orders barked out by the captain of the guard, who was just doing what the director demanded, who was in turn under the command of Giacomo Puccini.

  Or with the hooded man, his mind lit by a firefly as he tries to recall a room he once attempted to memorize when it became increasingly clear to him that he would soon be banished.

  FIRE! I AM GIVING YOU A DIRECT ORDER.

  How heavy their extended rifles have become. The barrels teeter and dip, and seem to be growing like Pinocchio’s nose, although it’s common knowledge that rifles don’t lie. Still, just to hold one steady and true requires all the strength and concentration a man can summon.

  Turn on the bed lamp the better to illuminate the target. On some nights the silk shade suggests the color of lilacs and on others of areolas. See, the bat has vanished, which doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.

  FIRE! OR YOU’LL ALL BE SHOT!

  The lamp rests on a nightstand with a single drawer in which she keeps lotions and elixirs and stashes the dreams she records on blue airmail stationery when they wake her in the night—an unbound nocturnal diary. She blushed when she told him the dream in which she made love with the devil. He liked to do what you like to do to me—what we like, she said.

  In the cracked mirror each member of the squad sees himself aiming at himself. Only a moment has passed since the “Aim” command, but to the members of the squad it seems they’ve stood with finger ready on their triggers, peering down their sights, for so long that they’ve become confused as to who are the originals and who are the reflections. After the ragged discharge, when the smoke has cleared, who will be left standing and who will be shattered into shards?

  PLEASE, FIRE!

  I can’t wait like this any longer.

  Non ho amato mai tanto la vita.

  Seiche

  … ai-je enfermé sous ma langue un pays,

  gardé comme une hostie.

  —Nadia Tueni, Liban: Vingt poèmes pour un amour

  A seiche warning was in effect. Both the Chicago Tribune and the evening news featured accounts of the killer seiche of June 26, 1954, when a wave ten feet high and twenty-five miles wide rose from a placid Lake Michigan and swept seven fishermen off a breakwater at Montrose Harbor to their deaths. Atmospheric conditions were right for another.

  Were the beaches closed? I’m no longer sure. In memory, Lake Shore Drive is empty, ba
rred to traffic, as if awaiting a tsunami. I imagined the seiche like a towering wave from a Hiroshige print, all the more menacing for its froth of moonglow, suspended for a heartbeat before dashing against the night-lit skyline. I didn’t want to miss it.

  When I considered a vantage point, what came to mind was a single-story utility shed in the shadow of Madonna della Strada, the Art Deco cathedral on the Lake Shore campus of Loyola University. I’d attended Loyola on a track scholarship. Now I was a caseworker for the Cook County Department of Public Aid. My district was Bronzeville, on the South Side, not far from the barrio where I grew up. I was living on the North Side, in Rogers Park, the neighborhood surrounding the university, and on nights when I couldn’t sleep I had taken to going back to the campus to run as if I were still training for races. Lately, that was most nights. I’d never had insomnia before and wondered if the job was getting to me.

  I’d dug out my old track shoes. A potholed, obsolete cinder track circled the soccer field. I set up the hurdles I found toppled together in the nearly obliterated broad jump pit, and ran imaginary heats until my shirt was pasted to my back by sweat and I gasped for breath. Then, to a ticktock of crickets and lawn sprinklers, I jogged from campus along front yards, hurdling hedges and fences along the darkened residential blocks to the deserted beach at the end of Columbia Avenue. I stripped down to my jockstrap, draped my shoes, shorts, and the T-shirt that would later serve as a towel over a crossbar of the lifeguard chair, and waded out. A moonlit sandbar sloped gradually deeper; underfoot, the sand had assumed the undulations of waves. Waist-deep, I slid into the cool night water and swam from the city without looking back until I was out far enough to imagine I had crossed the boundary of a wake left behind long ago by a priest I once watched swim.

  * * *