Paper Lantern

by Stuart Dybek

  And if it’s not Cindy then maybe it’s that walking hunger strike Brianna, calling because someone’s spreading evil rumors, saying that she caught needle disease, and she hopes it hasn’t soured their relationship because it isn’t true. Okay, there was that one time he told her she owed him a twenty for the Zithromax he had to take, and maybe she has been looking a little faded lately, sleeping all day, but that’s because she’s been depressed that things between them haven’t been going well, and when he disappears as if he never wants to talk to her again it makes her terminally anxious. She wonders if he isn’t answering because he knows it’s her calling. Sometimes she’s convinced that Rafael’s got telepathy, a way of getting inside your mind that feels intimate until he uses your own thoughts against you. Oh, baby, don’t make me keep calling and calling when all I need to ask is a single question: Am I still the little maja posing on your bedroom wall, Sleeping Beauty drifting on the crystal ship of your mattress down the wavy, black river of her unloosed hair? I been growing it out for you. It grows twice as fast when I’m asleep.

  * * *

  There’s a lull after supper when what’s left of the day filters through the dusty blinds. Each slat is a ray—runway-blue, mescalito-violet, replicant-red. Above a horizon of tracks where L trains hurtle past looking as if they’ve been tagged while moving, the sky reverberates around a sinking fireball. The phone can no longer hide its utter lack of control. It repeats itself, a soprano practicing scales, in the airshaft, rousting pigeons, like the voice of that biker, face half hidden by the visor on the black helmet, who cruised the hood photographing murals. Stomper boots, black leather jeans, jacket scarred by zippers, KA-BAR knife slung from a tread belt—the full macho, but he didn’t move like a guy. Then, on a night of record-breaking heat, the biker rumbles up wearing a tank top that reads SERA OUTLAW and shows off her underarm hair and nipples punctuating white cotton as she bumps the custom red Harley with its vanity plate over the curb and parks it on the sidewalk. Her arms look pumped. A chartreuse luna moth has alighted on one shoulder blade. On the other, there’s a symbol that could be a ram’s horns or a rune from an ancient alphabet, welted up raw so that you wonder if she hit high C when she was branded. She pays the kids hanging out in front a buck each to watch her bike. Until then, she was the he they’d nicknamed Mr. Mariposa. Seeing her in the tank top, with her green moth tat, she’s rechristened Madame Moth.

  Not like she cares. She saunters to the corner, buys a snow cone from the old vendor who doesn’t scoop crushed ice, but shaves it off a block kept cold beneath a canvas as it was done in the country where he was a child. Yellowjackets swarm his bottles of tropical flavors. Madame Moth orders electric-blue syrup that tastes like no flavor in nature. Beneath the black visor, her lips at the melting edge of the paper cone turn frostbite-blue. Not pausing to drop her change into the sombrero of the blind accordion man pumping conjunto, she strolls back as if the only reason she’s come to the barrio is for a snow cone and, without raising the visor, vanishes through the doorway and up the stairs into the building’s ripe, unlit corridors.

  It’s not long—time enough to finish the cone, maybe for a toke or two, or to snort a line or huff fumes or chew one of those spooky gummies Rafael deals—before the airshaft echoes a chant that has renounced words, but not meaning. The city is full of people who can’t understand one another’s language but get the meaning—like listening to opera when all you have to go on is the pure emotion of the voice. Her voice sounds naked, and though the kids outside mock it, they know they’re listening to a sin.

  If in the stifling heat Rafael put on his respirator and painted only her streak of voice, he wouldn’t have to worry about finding the space on his walls to fit in a life-sized portrait of Sera Outlaw from the burbs, slumming on a pricey Harley, in her defiantly arrested Wild One getup. The portraits of the women from the hood who have staked out a place on the walls feel it’s already overcrowded. They don’t need Sera Outsider playing let’s pretend. Maybe there’s a patch of peeling plaster beneath the sink in the cramped john with its roaches and running toilet where Rafael could squeeze in a still life: the black helmet draped with a Victoria’s Secret cinnabar thong, weighting down the tank top, leather trou, knife, belt, stompers, piled on the buckled linoleum.

  The women see themselves reflected on Madame Moth’s visor. They can’t see her face. They wonder how they look to her, if she’s able to see beyond her own reflection. The women’s eyes don’t blink, never close, don’t sleep—even Sleeping Beauty’s eyes are painted open. Night is when they’re most awake. They watch over the dreaming artist tossing on a sweat-stained mattress surrounded by melted candle stubs. Their lips are parted as if they’re about to moan, pray, or whisper a lullaby, but he’s left them mute, a limitation they were unaware of until now as they silently listen to the yearning voice amplified by the airshaft. To paint her voice, Rafael would need to feather the spray into the icy impression of her lips; he’d need a hue that matched the unnatural taste of the blue nectar that’s soaked into the tongue she licks along his body.

  Sera Outlaw has her own ideas of what he’ll paint. She’s discussed the fantasies that haunt her at obsessive length with her shrink, Dr. Fallon, for whom talk is decidedly not cheap. “You need to work through them. Life is risk: experiment,” he’s counseled her. “When you’ll instinctively recognize the right one, it will shake you to the core.” If her fantasies could be perfectly realized outside the secret cell of her mind, then perhaps she could separate from them.

  Pose me as a queen blindfolded at the wild border of a realm I once ruled, bind me to a signpost to be abused by passing wanderers who care only for their own pleasure; paint me as the desecrated, living statue of a goddess, a deity from a shattered urn in a temple defiled by barbarians—brutish-looking men have always turned me on. Paint me as Saint Teresa in Ecstasy, or as Joan of Arc, stripped of armor and, threatened with punishment, flaring colors as if the mattress she’s staked to is a stained-glass window in the cathedral at Rouen.

  “Where?”

  “France.”

  “There’s not enough wall space. I’ll have to make up a big canvas.”

  “No, I want it to be a mural locked away in this room. I’ll need a key to visit it. You can whitewash the walls, paint over the others. You did them free, right? I’ll pay.”

  The voiceless women on the walls have begun to scream.

  “It’ll be your first commission. Paint the walls the white of a bride’s veil. Obliterate the skanks, then call me. It’ll be a new start for both of us. I’ll be your masterpiece.”

  * * *

  She returns during Fiesta del Sol, a time in August when Pilsen is baubled in lights. Blue Island Avenue closes from Eighteenth to Twenty-first Streets—three congested blocks of carnival rides whirling to mechanical mariachi music. A Ferris wheel, tall enough to reflect its luster along a shadowy church spire, rotates hypnotically. A ring has been erected in which masked luchadores wrestle in the way that life and death are locked in daily combat. There are galleries for games of chance, booths where fortunes are told, concession stands, and food stalls. A spicy haze from grilling chorizos smolders in the beam of an enormous searchlight battered by moths. For five tickets you can pan the beam along the undercarriage of clouds or off the skyline of downtown. When firecrackers start popping like a drive-by, no one dives for cover.

  Blocks away, inside St. Ann’s, a vigil candle strobes as it sputters in melted wax and the bullet-pocked stained-glass windows flicker.

  Stumbling back to his flat, buzzed on a cocktail of liana and mescal, Rafael notices the red Harley parked on the sidewalk. He looks up and down the empty street. Everyone not asleep, including the snow-cone vendor and the accordion man, must be at the fiesta. Rafael climbs the dark stairs yodeling out gritos in a soulful yi-yi-yi! Ordinarily, he’s quiet, tight-lipped. Perhaps he has confused his flirting with a fortune-teller for feeling intimations of the future. When the fortune-teller asked t
o read his palm, Rafael told her he was sorry, but he didn’t have the five tickets that seeing the future cost. She caught his wrist and pulled him close. “For you, a free sample,” she said. Smiling at his handsome face, she turned his palm over and traced its lines, before jerking her finger back as if she’d been shocked. Or as if she had seen too many cheesy movies where a phony gypsy fakes the same theatrical response—which is what Rafael told her.

  “If you don’t believe in telling the future, do you believe in telling the past? The past is just as secret and mysterious,” she said. “But I can read what’s hidden in your eyes.”

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  “You are hiding twelve tickets. If your first fortune didn’t please you, you’d of had enough tickets left to buy a completely new one. Only a fool thinks he can deceive a Roma.”

  Rafael laughed, reached in his pocket, and dropped a handful of tickets on the counter before her.

  “Too late,” she told him. “Once you miss your chance you can give all you got, but won’t catch fate’s attention again.”

  “I guess it’s good night, then,” he said.

  “Don’t go without this,” she said, and handed him the key to his flat. “You just tried to give it away along with your tickets. You’re drunk, angel.”

  “So are you,” he said, and leaned into the booth to kiss her.

  “I told you, it’s too late,” she said. “Even a kiss that will be my first thought in the morning won’t matter.”

  In the dark hallway, at the door of his flat, Rafael searches his jeans for the key. He knows the fortune-teller returned it. He can summon the cinnamon taste of her mouth. She must have been eating churros. The key is in his shirt pocket where he never puts it.

  “Somebody had a fun fiesta,” Sera Outlaw says. “How come you didn’t invite me? We could’ve held hands on the Ferris wheel. I’ve been waiting for you to call, I can’t say patiently. Any idea what that feels like—waiting when you really want something, when you can’t stop thinking about it, and the more you obsess, the more you need it?”

  He unlocks the door and she follows him into the dark flat and strikes a match to light the twist of a joint. The eyes on the walls reflect the flame of the match. Cindy’s transparent gown glimmers. “They’re still all here,” she says. “Did you even get the fucking whitewash?”

  “Been busy.” He accepts the joint, sucks the smoke, and holds it in.

  “Don’t turn on the light,” she says. “Creeps me out when roaches run for cover.” She strikes matches until all the candle stubs ringed around the mattress are flickering.

  Down the street, L trains traveling from opposite directions, jammed with fiesta revelers, arrive with a simultaneous screech at the muraled Leavitt station. The station’s stairs and their risers are a mosaic waterfall. After the trains racket off, regular street noise passes for quiet.

  “Your bitches don’t like me,” she says, “and I don’t appreciate the way they’re glaring at my tits. You’re their master, make them disappear.”

  “I’m no one’s master—including my own.”

  “Don’t get vanilla on me, Rafael. How old are you? Twenty-one? I told you I’ll pay. What’s holding things up? You fall in love with your own creations, your own fantasies? They demand allegiance, don’t they? Hard to let go. It’s lonely without them adoring you, waiting when you come home at night. Look at the cummy stains on this mattress!”

  She inhales as if sighing and lazily passes him the joint, and then, before he can react, draws her knife and flings it into Sleeping Beauty.

  “Whoa!” he says, exhaling smoke.

  “No scream? Blood should be gushing down the wall, puddling the floor. You got to get your red paint out if you want to see that. So, okay, no more passivity, we’re going to have a little private fiesta of wall-cleaning.”

  She springs up, yanks the knife from Sleeping Beauty’s heart, and jams it into the painting’s face, then wheels into a practiced kickboxing move, and the heel of her stomper boot caves in one of Sleeping Beauty’s plaster breasts. She’s balletic in her fury. Rafael finishes the joint, while watching from the mattress what looks like a cardio routine run amok. She jabs, whirls, slashes, kicks, and plunges the knife, working herself into a breathless tantrum of destruction. Good thing whoever lives next door is probably at the fiesta.

  On Blue Island, the Ferris wheel is stuck. Couples lean over the sides of their gondolas shouting, “Yo, get us down!” A carny worker shouts up, “Remain seated, please! Do not try climbing out!” “Yo, we going to have to fucking spend the night up here or what?” “No need to panic. The fire department is on the way!” It’s a still, sultry night, and the gondola at the very top—nearly the height of the steeple—has started to stir in the rhythmic way that lovers can get a parked car rocking. It catches the attention of a few people in the crowd. They’re pointing up.

  Tonight, Sera Outlaw is a warrior—Joan of Arc, stripped of armor and waiting to suffer further indignities. Twisted coat hangers secure her ankles and bind her arms over her head. On the mattress beside her, Rafael sits baking one end of a straightened wire hanger over a candle. Along with the scent of weed and melted wax, and the musty updraft of the airshaft, the flat has acquired an acrid, metallic smell.

  “What do you think you’re doing with that?” she asks. “Get your paints.”

  “Too bad I’m out of marshmallows.”

  “That’s a guy crack. I took you for someone who could get into the drama. You think the saints didn’t know submission’s how you get the attention we crave from God?”

  “I’m setting the mood,” he says. “You told me when they threatened her, she like got off in Technicolor.”

  “I don’t play with fire—at least not that way.”

  “Somebody did,” he says, and gently lowers his lips to the brand on her shoulder.

  “That was an initiation. I’m an Aries. Untie me, I mean fucking now.”

  Instead, he blindfolds her with her white tank top. He fastens his mouth over hers, and then touches the tip of the clothes hanger to the luna moth. It’s not the end that he’s heated, but she screams with a force that makes him swallow as if she’s filled his mouth with electric-blue syrup. Her teeth clench on his lower lip and he hollers back.

  On Blue Island, a kid who’s spent his last five tickets on the searchlight instead of buying a taco has trained the beacon on the gondola at the top of the stalled Ferris wheel. The dazzling beam doesn’t inhibit the couple who’s up there. They’ve ducked down and must be lying together flat on the bench seat, and can’t be seen from the ground. Still, the spotlight has made them stars—daring acrobats without a net, determined to put on a show. The gondola rocks recklessly, desperately, as their grand performance builds to a climax against the night sky. The crowd below cheers, even as sirens wail and the fire trucks run red lights down Eighteenth toward the fiesta. The firemen will be here any moment with their axes, bullhorns, and ladders. No one in the crowd is leaving until a ladder rises as it would to a blazing tenement window and, to riotous applause, the couple climb out and begin their descent back to the ordinary world.

  Rafael presses her white tank top to his bloody mouth. “I was just messing with you,” he says. “You bit through my lip, you goddamn flake. Look what you did to my walls.”

  “Untie me, you crazy dick. Do you know who you’re fucking with? I’m like totally connected. You have any idea who my uncle is?”

  “You’re the one came to me to get painted. You don’t have to pay. I work better free.”

  He slips on his respirator, conscious of his swollen lip, and, careful of her bound legs kicking at his balls, fits her visored helmet over her coral Mohawk while she spits nonstop curses. He starts with her bare feet: sprays them alchemy-gold. The black stompers standing beside the mattress get a coat of rubber-ducky yellow. Candy-cane stripes twirl up her legs and polka dots float from navel to the Cousteau-blue ruff inspired by her tongue. On the back of h
er helmet he paints a cherry-red honker and a white-lipped, watermelon-slice smile from which a blue tongue sticks out at the world. When she’s on the bike, a clown will appear to be looking backward. Raphael takes the precaution of dislodging the knife from where she’s rammed it into one of Cindy’s eyes after the spiderweb gown resisted her attempts to hack it to shreds.

  “Even though you’re about as convincing a badass as Michael Jackson, something tells me it would be a mistake to return your blade just now,” he says. “Sorry I don’t have something to swap for it like a rubber horn to honk on your Harley.”

  “I’ll be back for it with a nine-mil to honk up your ass, and not by myself, either. You just used up all your lives in one fucking evening.”

  On Blue Island, the aerial ladder truck has successfully completed its rescue of all the couples on the Ferris wheel. By the time the ladder cranked to the top of the wheel, the highest gondola was hanging motionless, becalmed on the still night air. The crowd stared up, waiting for the disheveled, daredevil lovers to emerge. They would become fiesta legends, a Romeo and Juliet crisscrossed by beacons, their suspended, pearlescent boat sailing past the suffering Christs on all the steeples in the city, afloat on dark matter with novas exploding like flak, and the infinite blackness decaled with skyrockets and gold-glitter comets. Actually, when a fireman reached their gondola, they were gone. Where, who can say? Maybe the rocking gondola had been an optical illusion—a gentle sway in an indiscernible breeze—as seen from below. A few measly skyrockets pop and parachute down on Pilsen, a signal that the fiesta is over for tonight. Bulbs blink off in the shuttered stalls. With the mechanical mariachi music silenced, it’s possible to hear the accordion. The snow-cone vendor pushes his cart along Eighteenth dragging a trail of melted ice.