Paper Lantern

by Stuart Dybek

  Alchemy-gold footprints trail down the stairs and out the doorway. Her motorcycle is parked illegally on the sidewalk where she left it. Some joker returning from the fiesta in a party mood has tied a pink heart-shaped balloon to its handlebars. The streets resound with the pipes-and-tambourine laughter of blitzed revelers heading toward the L station. The searchlight, shooting from Blue Island, sweeps along the apartment buildings. A painted woman sits on her motorcycle, staring up as the beam crosses Rafael’s dark third-story window. He stands half naked, looking out, the bluish beam smoldering with the smoke of his cigarette, each slat in the blinds a slash along his body.

  “You motherfucker,” she yells at the window, in a voice nothing like that soprano in the airshaft, “I’m coming back packing, when you least expect it. You’re going to beg. You’re already a dead man, asshole.” She revs her bike as if the snarling engine knows words she can’t find and guns along the sidewalk, sending revelers jumping out of the way and shouting at the goofy face looking back at them, “Pendeja loca!”

  The whine of the engine grows increasingly distant but refuses to disappear, as if someone were riding in furious, self-destructive circles at the edge of consciousness, a 500cc Buell Blast boring into sleep, invading dreams, and morphing into the ringing of a phone.

  * * *

  Squash a sweaty pillow over your ears, but the reverberations continue. The call is no longer pleading. When it’s hopeless to plead, there’s rage. When it was hopeless to rage, Rafael stood staring at the mattress he no longer could lie on. The silhouette of her body was visible, shaped by the pointillist spray around it, like the impression of a body chalked on a sidewalk by police. He lugged the mattress to the bathtub, squirted it with lighter fluid, watched the flames ignite and wither. When the bathroom filled with smoke, he turned on the water taps, and sat beside the airshaft window.

  He wasn’t going to sleep anyway, so why not stuff some clothes in the backpack with his paints and, from the can of bandages, take the skinny tube of dope-deal dollars and, checking that the street is empty, walk off? The extension lamp of a mechanic working on the Ferris wheel to the wheeze of an accordion illuminates the street behind. The street ahead is unlit as if there were a power outage. It must be that the strobing vigil light in St. Ann’s has guttered out. Still, within the darkened sanctuary, the resident saints and angels continue their supplications. One must not think that a person who is suffering is not praying. Oh, how everything that is suffered with love is healed again.

  Wait alone on the L platform for an empty night train, the kind of train that clatters through sleep, a train boarded by nightmares and dreams masked like luchadores, indistinguishable from one another in their babushkas, fedoras, respirators, and dark glasses. When it reaches the end of the line it won’t stop. It goes by I’m Sorry Street, by Forgive Me Avenue, by Fucked Up Again Boulevard. By the time it passes What Have I Done, it’s traveling too fast. Maybe this once it will hurtle by fate and you’ll be free. And then what? Rafael might have boarded that train, if he could have thought of where to get off.

  Listen, the telephone, driven mad with rejection, doesn’t even want to be answered any longer. It is like an alarm that, rather than a warning, wishes to be the thing it’s warning against—a break-in or a fire burning out of control. The caller’s ring is like an ambulance siren that wants to be the accident itself—a head-on collision or a hit-and-run, a mugging, a drive-by.

  The women on the wall with their hacked faces and staved-in bodies hear it ring but don’t answer. Maybe they are calling themselves. Cindy locked for the night in the laundromat, too weak with internal bleeding to speak, or her lost daughter, Jade, calling Rafael’s number in the hope that her stepmother might answer, or Brianna, OD’d on pills, calling to say adiós through the plastic bag she’s pulled over her head, or Rafael’s old tia, who holds the receiver to the radio so for once in his life he can hear Pavarotti hit that high C in Turandot, or his mother calling to say that his half brother, Gabriel, was stillborn, or his father calling from Hanoi; nuns, priests, teachers, cops, parole officers, social workers, the Devil’s Disciples, Darrell, all in a snaky line waiting before a gutted pay phone for their turn.

  Now that it’s gone on long enough to assume a life of its own, the call never wants to stop. It’s too late for talk now anyway, and if someone, anyone, answered, suddenly picked up the receiver and said hello, there’d be no answer in return.

  “Hello? Hello … who is this? Who the fuck are you? What fucking business do you have calling and calling at this hour? Don’t you get it: nobody’s fucking home.”

  Not even the breath of an obscene breather. Only silence.

  “After all that fucking ringing, say something … anything … please, talk to me.”

  Oceanic

  1

  It was probably fair to say, as beachgoers did, that the Lifeguard had returned to duty too soon. Though the shark attack occurred long ago, his wounds had yet to heal. Was it to compensate for his reduced physical stature that his guard tower rose higher than such structures normally did? Its ointment-white paint peeled like a sunburn. Sunbathers avoided the shadow it cast across the sand, not to mention the furrowed trail of rusted blood between the chair and the water. After the beaches closed on Labor Day, and the crew of lifeguards turned in their emergency-orange tank tops and went back to school or to less glamorous jobs, he remained behind with the ghost crabs and shorebirds. The prints of terns and sandpipers mottled the sand around the high throne where he sat, silhouetted against an Indian-summer sky, like a king deserted by his subjects, his realm of sand and water reflected across his mirror lenses, a silent silver whistle clenched between his teeth.

  Local legend had it that he was awaiting the return of the dolphin that had saved him, in order to express his thanks. He’d been in shock from loss of blood when the dolphin ferried him ashore, and in his confused state the Lifeguard thought a mermaid had rescued him. Yet some rejected that story as apocryphal. They quoted eyewitness accounts that it wasn’t a dolphin but a child’s blow-up rubber frog—the toy the Lifeguard had swum out to save and then washed back up in.

  It was a story in flux. In another version the Lifeguard’s vigil had nothing to do with a dolphin, let alone a rubber frog, but with a drowned girl he’d revived with the kiss of life. The experience was for him a kind of conversion—Saul on the road to Damascus. At that impressionable age when boys entering manhood assess their futures, the Lifeguard became convinced he possessed a gift for saving lives. No matter the cost, he’d found his destiny.

  On midnights lit by the palpations of driftwood fires, when ghost stories were passed around a circle along with charred marshmallows, reefers, and jug wine, his tale was whispered like a secret. After the Lifeguard pulled the drowned girl from the water, his frantic attempt at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation failed to stir her. At last, exhausted and defeated, he stood dizzily and stared at her lying at his feet. Her eyes were closed as if she were asleep, her lips parted as if uttering a silent Oh lodged in her throat like a bite of poisoned apple. Her bikini top had come undone, exposing a breast whose nipple, plum with cold, should have been puckered but looked erect. She was so lovely that he dropped back to his knees, gathered her wet, sun-streaked hair in a fist, and brought her lips to his, this time in disregard for prescribed CPR technique. Their teeth collided, he jabbed his tongue into her cold mouth, traveled the unevenness of her gumline, pausing to examine a chipped canine, and the ridges behind her teeth, then flicked his tongue across the pores of hers, and felt her respond. The Lifeguard had never believed the rumors—if he’d heard them at all—about a flat-chested, nondescript girl in a hot-pink bikini who became seductively beautiful only after drowning. She drowned herself at beaches up and down the coast so that lifeguards might resuscitate her, and in the process she swallowed their souls. Even if he had heard the rumors, the kiss would have obliterated caution. It flowed between them, composed of breath, time, and briny spit, and seemed
to surge into a life force that was breathless, timeless, and oceanic. He didn’t realize until too late that the climactic urge to surrender to it was his soul being sucked from his body.

  “So she was a swallower,” someone at the fire would say, a tired joke that served as an excuse for stoned laughter.

  But it was no joke to the lifeguards who’d braved riptides and undertow to save her, those athletic boys earning money for college, whom she left hollow, directionless, and arrested by a narcissism fixed on adolescent reflections: worn snapshots from which they grinned back still young and golden, with movie-star sunglasses perched on their white-slathered noses, whistles dangling like holy medals. Unable to love another woman, unable to live alone, they’d gaze at those demigods they were for one brief moment of summer, and weep.

  The Lifeguard didn’t weep; he watched and waited. When the girl came to drown once more, he’d save her again, and from her cold mouth suck back his soul. Night enlarged an already enormous sea. A seabird cried out. As if in answer, a voice could be heard over the surf, singing. Come dawn, the Lifeguard was still there, his hair bleached silver as if he’d spent too much time beneath the moon.

  2

  Duane Shelly, my roommate the year I spent in military school, claimed he was a reincarnated Romantic poet. He relived his previous legendary life in dreams from which he hated to wake, and so he’d oversleep and miss his morning classes. It was the kind of affectation that had persuaded his father to send him to military school. A coterie of girls at our sister school found him intriguing, and I was allowed to tag along as Lord Byron if I agreed to limp. Shelly, who hated to be called Duane, provided us with good weed and fake IDs for the bars, and it took only a few drinks before he’d begin to declaim: “O haloed Bud sign, O toke of mystery! O night’s black lipstick! O life that is a fake ID!”

  The timidity of my own Romantic rebellion disappointed him.

  “All you need for a barbaric yawp, Byron, is the circular vowel that this vulgar century we’re forced to inhabit has appropriated for the Big O,” Shelly confided. “It’s the secret of Romantic transformation: O sullen soulless homework! O sperm-crusty plaid boxers! O morning woody saluting attention, sir!”

  Shelly returned to mind on a weekday when Mariel and I played hooky from our sullen soulless jobs in order to sneak in a last trip to the beach, and I found myself yawping: “O final flame of Indian summer before the frost!”

  “I hope that term hasn’t become offensive,” Mariel said. “Do you think Native Americans call it Indian summer, too?”

  “Stop worrying and give the old poetic O a whirl,” I told her, not that she struck me as the type who would have gone in for black lipstick, or for a poseur like Duane. But then, despite all our time together, I knew next to nothing about what she’d been like in high school, or, for that matter, about the kind of boys she’d found attractive. Early on, Mariel told me she wasn’t one to dwell on the past. She thought the boomers still lining up for Dead concerts were pathetic. She said nostalgia, like most things self-indulgent, was ultimately boring.

  “O hidden heart of fading summer,” she said, being a sport and playing along in a way meant to be ironic. Yet I caught a note of such wistfulness in her voice that I had to suppress an impulse to ask: Are you talking about us?

  And if she had answered yes, I would have had to admit that I, too, felt that something had faded between us, and I missed Mariel and Bryan, that crazy-about-each-other-couple-living-for-the-moment we’d once been. I wanted to be them again.

  O haloed trips to the beach when we first met! It was thrill enough then simply to watch Mariel strip down to her swimsuit as if she couldn’t wait to shed her clothes. She’d kick off her sandals and unbutton her blouse while simultaneously shimmying from unzipped jeans, and then adjust her swimsuit like a teenage girl, tugging it over a buttock and hitching up her top as if concerned with modesty even though the choice to wear a revealing pink bikini was hers. She’d stretch out facedown on a beach towel, untie her bikini straps, and have me slather her with lotions scented with coconut and almond. Her sun-streaked hair seemed a perfect complement to her gleaming skin. I told her once, “A lot of people would pay to have hair your color.”

  “And I’m one of them,” she said.

  I’d laughed. We were still all but strangers then, having met earlier that spring, and I remember wondering if she was the kind of woman whose self-deprecating humor sprang not only from a distrust of vanity but also from a refusal to play along with the manipulative flattery of men. It turned out that she was gracious when told she was beautiful, although the fact that she was beautiful may have made the compliment acceptable. She prided herself on being a realist, someone who, as she liked to say, “tells it straight or not at all.” I hadn’t realized yet that the emphasis fell on not at all.

  I drove a vintage VW Bug at the time, pumpkin-orange with the engine in the rear and a convertible top that folded down by hand. Mariel liked my choice of car—“the ultimate beachmobile,” she observed—even though it was April, rainy and chill and therefore cruel given the Bug’s dysfunctional heater and leaky top. Once summer kicked in, that car lived up to her name for it. We’d pack a cooler with a picnic lunch—cold pizza and a bottle of wine—and drive to one beach or another, each weekend farther south along the coast. We were on a quest to find a beach with a riding stable nearby. Mariel, who moonlighted as an instructor at a school for dressage, had heard about a place where you could rent horses to ride through the surf, though we never found it. I’d never seen her ride, but horses were the measure in the sweetest, most haunting thing she ever told me: “The way I know I’ll always love horses, I know I’ll always love you.”

  After the battery dropped through the rusted-out floor, I sold the beachmobile to a collector. I drive a Ford Taurus wagon now.

  It was a day for hooky. The twisting shore road climbed through the color change, its macadam pasted with leaves. We sped along windward stretches where the rainbow haze of spindrift made it seem as if we’d just missed a sun shower. This time we were heading north, where the coast was wilder and deserted, as if making a getaway. And maybe we had escaped, if only for the drive, from Mariel and Bryan—a couple we referred to in the third person. “I liked those two people,” Mariel would say in a rare nod to the past, and I’d agree. Despite their unfair competition with the present, I liked them, too.

  On a stretch of beach selected at random, I set down the cooler, slipped off my backpack, and Mariel plunged the stake of her beach umbrella into the sand. Then she kicked off her sandals, undid her blouse, and eased off her jeans. She was wearing a black one-piece I hadn’t seen before. We hadn’t been to a beach in a very long time. The suit emphasized the swell of her breasts and the width of her shoulders. In an evening dress, those shoulders were arresting. She had a rider’s posture and a swimmer’s build.

  “That’s an athletic-looking suit,” I said.

  “I’m afraid my bikini days are over.”

  “Nonsense, you’re trim as ever.”

  “Forever young?” she asked. “Do you think, to remain so, one has to become her own child?”

  “You’re still a beautiful woman, is what I think.”

  “Thanks, Bry. I know you mean it. We’ve grown older and it’s sweet of you not to notice, but I don’t want to be someone who doesn’t realize when it’s time to dress appropriately.”

  The beach was deserted, and the water, despite the sun flaring off its surface, was already too cold for swimming. We sloshed barefoot, stopping to skip stones and to collect shells, though they were wave-worn beyond recognition. It was like wading along a coast of broken china. We were about to turn back when Mariel noticed hoofprints in the sand. They emerged suddenly from the water and continued at a gallop down the beach in the direction we’d been heading.

  “Let’s follow them,” she said.

  I was sorry I’d left my watch and the car keys behind, in one of my shoes. We walked, glancing back to see
if our encampment was safe: our towels, the cooler with its iced bottle of champagne, the blue ukulele on which I could pick out “Blue Moon” but no longer remembered how to tune, and the umbrella she called her Italian umbrella.

  That faded beach umbrella obviously meant something to her. I recalled a day toward the end of one of our first summers together—they seemed a single, seamless summer now—when we’d accidentally left it behind. We had camped on the windward shore of a peninsula that wasn’t on the highway map and, after drinking a bottle of wine, lay kissing beneath the umbrella, beside the surf as if—Mariel joked—we were auditioning for parts in the love scene in From Here to Eternity. We’d fooled around at beaches before—Mariel called it mashing—but that particular afternoon we kissed in a trance. I stretched out against her and she began to tremble until she was in the throes of an abandoned shuddering. It felt like we were connected only by the pressure of our lips, even when she locked her legs around me and clung, intent upon taking me along to wherever she was rushing. Her breath seemed to echo through my body, through a labyrinthine network of self I didn’t know existed until I heard her moaning lost in it.

  Afterward, we lay drowsily staring at the underside of the umbrella, Mariel squeezing my hand with each aftershock. The sounds of gulls and surf arrived as if from a great distance.

  “That was oceanic,” she whispered.

  “Have you ever come kissing before?” It wasn’t the kind of question I normally asked, but I felt shaken, changed. It had never happened to me with anyone.

  “Sometimes in dreams,” she said. “Sometimes I wake coming.”

  “With whom?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t remember who once you wake?”

  “It’s always a stranger.”