Paper Lantern

by Stuart Dybek

  She heard a tarantella before she saw the hurdy-gurdy man. His mascot—part monkey, part spider—danced, straining, at the end of a golden chain.

  “Give a coin for Jocko’s cup, jailbait, or else a kiss you must give up,” the hurdy-gurdy man said. When she didn’t stop, he released the golden chain. And though Jocko on his eight muscular legs accelerated as the balloon man could not, she was older now, and faster, and he couldn’t run her down.

  Waves whumped in from a horizon the gray of blue jays. A mica haze of atomized ocean hung above slick cobblestones. Rolling thunder roiled the whitecaps, the periscopes and shark fins and sounding flukes. When she came to a brimming horse trough, she stopped as if to drink, and doubled over, a stitch in her side.

  A man with hound eyes, a hawk nose, a military mustache, tarnished hair, and a drooping gut smiled at her from the entrance to a shop whose doorposts were white plaster goddesses. He held a riding crop as one might a fly swatter. The goddesses were crisscrossed with bloody welts that presumably had been horseflies. Each time his hand rose to smooth his mustache, a goddess flinched.

  “Do you train horses, sir?” she asked.

  “Something better, young lady,” he said. “I’ve a unicorn prances on your palm. A ballerina balances on his horn. Wind him and a tune makes her spin. Come inside before the storm and hear my whimsical collection from olden times the wide world over—ballerinas, gypsies, odalisques, nymphs. One has your name on it, perhaps.”

  “I’m afraid, sir, I don’t have so much as a coin.”

  “Oh, it will be my gift to you.”

  “Don’t go in,” an old man in dark glasses and a crushed green hat whispered, as he pushed his piled dray past.

  “But a storm is near and this kind sir has offered to show me his collection of music boxes.”

  “Years will pass and you won’t come back out of his shop still yourself.”

  She glanced at the man in the doorway of his shop. He smiled and beckoned with his riding crop.

  “Where did you get all those umbrellas?” she asked the man with the dray.

  “I find them discarded, or maybe they find me—blown inside out, twisted, mildewed, lost, forgotten in pubs, left behind on beaches. Gamps, brollys, bumbershoots, parasols—some for rain, others for sun. I mend them.”

  The weight of the first plip of rain on the surface of the trough made it brim into a waterfall that rilled along the gutters. Rats chirped from the swirling sewers and scurried toward the white wooden belfry that overlooked the docks. Its carillon pealed helter-skelter in gusts off the sea.

  “I’m afraid,” she said, “a downpour is coming.”

  “Each is beautiful in its own way,” the umbrella mender said. “Some are silk and some are canvas, but all are made of shadow. Don’t be afraid. Sit and I’ll push us along.”

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Why, on a day like this to the beach, of course.”

  Lightning unspooled along the ocean, the gutters, the lenses of the umbrella mender’s glasses. A jagged bolt blistered the belfry. Bats sailed out, burning like heretics.

  “This one’s my favorite,” he said, pausing to free a beach umbrella from the pile. “Found it washed ashore just yesterday. Who knows how long it’s been at sea or from where it drifted. Its faded stripes are lovely still. And look at the lettering: Ombra. Italian, maybe? If it can support the golden weight of summer, don’t worry about a thunderstorm. And when it opens, don’t let the clowns surprise you.”

  “Clowns?” she asked.

  “Or the jugglers or the acrobats. I think you’ll like the beautiful bareback rider. That trough back there is for her horse.”

  “But how can all that be?”

  “Why, my sweet girl, has no one ever told you, every umbrella is a big top?”

  7

  O look at the moon tonight. Look at the moon, Earth’s O in the sky.

  O all the spirits of love that wander by. O presences.

  O silver face of night, you saw me standing alone. O soft embalmer of the still midnight, O somber soul unsleeping, without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own. O shades of night—vast, veiled, inexpressible. O orb that broods above the troubled sea of mind. O mysterious priest! O wondrous singer! O soft self-wounding pelican. O well for the fisherman’s boy who rides the dolphin. O ethereal rhetoric, O hidden heart, O dark swells that rock a helpless soul. O wave god who broke through me. O I heard someone whisper please adore me. O Attic shape! O boat of stars, O black sail, O remember that my life is wind. This is thy hour O Soul, the free flight into the wordless …

  Look at the moon tonight.

  O look at the moon.

  If I Vanished

  “What if I were to vanish?”

  “Vanish? Under what circumstances?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You mean, like—poof!—suddenly you’re not there?”

  “I’m not there.”

  “But there’s always a reason, or at least a context. You suddenly moved away in the middle of the night? But why? Were you kidnapped? Abducted by aliens? An extraordinary rendition by the CIA? Did you fall down a rabbit hole? Was it amnesia? Vanishing cream? Did you meet someone else? Was there a note—maybe in invisible ink—an impersonal e-mail, a message on my answering machine saying, ‘Goodbye’s too good a word, babe, don’t worry, ciao’? Should I show up at the Department of Missing Persons—is there really such a department? Or by ‘vanish’ do you mean that all trace of you would be wiped from my memory?”

  “Say I met someone else.”

  “Well, see, that’s a different question.”

  “You don’t have to answer that one. I saw the answer in your eyes. They’re more honest than you are.”

  “Where’d you come up with this?”

  “I heard it in a movie.”

  “What movie? Certainly not The Vanishing.”

  “It was a western.”

  “Clint Eastwood? Duke Wayne? Roy Rogers?”

  “Kevin Costner.”

  “Costner a cowboy? I hope it was better than Dances with Wolves when he went Native American. Pauline Kael said in her review that Kevin Costner had feathers not only in his hair but in his head.”

  “It wasn’t Kevin Costner per se. It was Charley something, the character Kevin Costner plays, who gets asked the question—by Annette Bening.”

  “No, it wasn’t Charley something. Characters in American movies are only poor excuses to watch movie stars. Can you remember the name of any of the characters Marilyn Monroe played? They’re all Marilyn Monroe. Charlton Heston isn’t Moses, Moses is Charlton Heston.”

  “Answer the question.”

  “First, you have to tell me if you want me to answer it as if we’re in some movie. I don’t know who’s starring as us or what cynical hack wrote our dialogue, and that would be important because if Ceil and Ned are in an Ingmar Bergman Swedish cowboy film, then Ned’s answer is going to be different than if, say, Quentin Tarantino is directing.”

  “You’re stalling.”

  “Because a question about vanishing is easy to answer in a movie where the good guys always win. If we’re in a western I reckon I’d say, ‘If you vanished, ma’am, I’d mount my horse and ride after you to the ends of the earth. I’d ride to the silver mountains of the moon and back, gunning down Injuns and other swarthy Third World desperadoes until I found you again and we galloped off into a Technicolor sunset.’”

  “In other words, you’d make fun of me.”

  “I’m making fun of cowboy kitsch, of the Big Tobacco Marlboro Man mythos, of the genocidal, racist, anti-environmental, heil Adolph Coors’s right-wing all-American West.”

  “No, you’re making fun of me. And you’re wrong, by the way. In the movie, he doesn’t answer anything like that. He doesn’t answer at all right away. He goes off to think about it, like you could have done, and he comes back with the answer.”

  “Okay, I give. Tell me the right an
swer.”

  “You want to know, go see the movie.”

  * * *

  He doesn’t see the movie until two years later, after she has vanished. Clearly, by “vanish” she hadn’t meant that she’d be wiped from his memory.

  Ned doesn’t remember the title, if he ever knew it, but one night, unable to concentrate on any book in the house, he Googles Western Costner Bening, and finds fifty thousand five hundred entries for a film called Open Range. Kevin Costner not only stars in it; he also directed it.

  According to the reviews that Ned skims, it’s a movie about the war between free grazers and landowners: “A former gunslinger is forced to take up arms again when he and his cattle crew are threatened by a corrupt lawman.” The free grazers—Costner as the gunslinger, Charley Waite, and Robert Duvall as Boss Spearman—are the good guys. The evil rancher who controls the law is played by Michael Gambon. Their economic clash is a moral contest: greedy corporate America versus the don’t-fence-me-in values of the Old West. The conflict plays out against what many reviewers agree is a beautifully photographed “iconic vista”—Montana, 1882, a big-sky landscape that makes it look as if there were enough to go around for everyone, especially since the original free-grazing tribes have been eradicated. The film was actually shot in Alberta.

  Reviews compare Open Range to classics like High Noon. Amateurs at Amazon rate it a four-star masterpiece. The Cleveland Sun News, where dollar signs rather than stars are awarded, agrees: 4½ $. It’s a Hot Pick, “a paean to the Old West,” for Boo Allen of the Denton Record-Chronicle, and an A-minus for Roger Ebert, who praises its defense of the values of a vanishing lifestyle.

  That mention of a “vanishing lifestyle” catches Ned’s attention. He wonders if vanishing is a motif in the movie, a theme echoed in the love story between Costner and Bening, prompting her odd question: What if I were to vanish?

  Other reviews are less enthusiastic. It’s panned in The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The New Yorker. Rolling Stone despises “its insufferable nobility,” and Newsday complains of “the man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do excess” of the script. A couple reviewers find that it mirrors Bush’s cowboy presidency, with his bring-it-on War on Terror and Wanted Dead or Alive rhetoric. It makes a Worst Movies of the Year list: “a Harlequin Romance with a gunfight at the O.K. Corral.”

  From the little that Ceil said, Ned had assumed that the movie was a love story, but the reviews mostly agree that Costner’s relationship with Bening seems superfluous. Bening plays Sue Barlow, with what is described on Yahoo! UK as “the steely resolve” of “a spinster who has nearly given up on love.” Iggy’s Film Reviews cautions: “Even by Harlequin Romance standards, the ties that bind these two lonely folks are flimsy. Unless Sue placed a personal ad seeking a SWM, age 40–50, who loves dogs, cares about friends and has killed before and will kill again, the attraction between the two doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  Undeterred, Ned decides to see for himself. Whatever the answer to the question about vanishing, Ceil must have experienced a shock of recognition at something in the film. Tonight, his missing her has assumed the guise of curiosity, and curiosity is preferable to feeling her absence. It’s late, already after eleven thirty, but he knows a Blockbuster that’s open until midnight, and should be able to just make it.

  * * *

  The street has vanished, been whited out. He’d been so absorbed in cyberspace, he hadn’t noticed. It seems to Ned that the snowfall should have a hiss of its own, something other than the swish of tires from the Dunkin’ Donuts–lit cross street at the end of the block. If the legend that Eskimos have a hundred words for snow were true, there’d be an Inuit word meaning snow-that-makes-the-familiar-unrecognizable. Ned can’t tell which of the plastered shapes lining the curb is his Volvo. He imagines having to go car by car, brushing off snow to find his, and when he realizes that he might not make Blockbuster in time, the intensity of his disappointment surprises him. Then he spots his car, dim under the only streetlight that’s burned out. Rather than take the time to scrape the windows, he scoops snow from them with his bare hands. When the engine turns over, the radio plays. He flicks on the defroster, wipers, headlights. It takes only that time for him to recognize the piano version of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, the movement titled “Gnomus,” which is meant to evoke the picture of a nutcracker in the shape of a gnome promenading on deformed legs. Ned practiced this piece for a whole semester in college when he still studied piano. He hasn’t heard Pictures in years, and it occurs to him that sometimes one no longer listens to a beloved masterpiece in order to continue to love it. Even on the car radio, over the scrape of wipers, he can hear coughing from the audience. Perhaps the pianist is Sviatoslav Richter, at the legendary live recital in Bulgaria. Ned remembers reading that after Richter’s possessed performance, the Steinway he used had to be junked. He doesn’t wait for the engine to warm.

  The snow-paved Blockbuster parking lot is empty and Ned leaves the car running, wipers swiping, radio broadcasting a movement titled “Catacombae,” which echoes the spectral world beneath the streets of Paris. Ghosts seem to swirl across the deserted streets of Ned’s city, as well. He rushes in and a white kid with rusty dreadlocks shoots him a dirty look from behind the counter, before directing him to the Action section. It only now occurs to Ned that the movie might be checked out and he scans the rack feeling ridiculously frantic. He’s in luck, it’s there between Steven Seagal’s On Deadly Ground and Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

  Open Range in hand, Ned opens the car door onto a blasting heater and the majesty of the last movement, “The Great Gate of Kiev.” With no more reason to hurry, he silences the heater and sits in the idling car, staring out at a parking lot, watching as his tire tracks left minutes earlier are obliterated by snow gathering as it might in Kiev. The yellow Blockbuster sign subtracts itself from night. Beneath the blurred streetlights, ascending notes and falling flakes create the impression of a gossamer arch spanning Chicago Avenue. Ned slips the Volvo into gear and drives slowly toward the towering gate of snow that retreats before his headlights, impossible to enter, then topples disassembling before the whirling blue of an oncoming squad car. The vision is more imagined than hallucinated, and Ned wonders how long it’s been since he was stoned for real. Not since a vacation when Ceil wanted to see what sex would be like on hashish. Instead of smoking it, they mixed it with honey and spices based on a recipe for a sweetmeat supposedly served by Alice B. Toklas at Gertrude Stein’s soirees. That night ended in an emergency room, with Ceil faint, terrified, hallucinating. She later said she’d had an out-of-body experience and seen herself dead. “Keep talking to her,” the doctor had told Ned. “Don’t let her slip away.” It’s not a scene he wants to recall.

  He thinks instead of the first time he heard Pictures at an Exhibition. His best friend in high school, Sal Rio, who played Fender bass in the band they’d started, had on an impulse stolen a Lincoln left idling in a valet parking lot. Their plan was to drive to Toronto, where Miles Davis was supposedly playing at a jazz festival. Neither Ned nor Sal had been to Canada. Instead, high, and joyriding after midnight, they cruised onto the Chicago Skyway, the city aglow beneath them. Ned punched on the stereo and when the orchestral version of Pictures at an Exhibition blared out they both began conducting wildly—not that either of them knew what was playing. When Sal dumped the car the next morning, he said, “Man, never made it to Miles, but all was not lost—we got to hear that Russian motherfucker.” All was not lost, Ned thinks. After that night, it became their go-to phrase and still makes him smile.

  Pictures over, Ned turns off the radio and makes a left into the Dunkin’ Donuts that has lit the end of his block for the three years he’s lived in the neighborhood. He’s never had the urge to stop there before. Maybe it’s where that cop car was racing from. Ceil claimed their coffee was good. If he’s going to do something so peculiar as to stay up late watching a film that more than one critic
complained was, at a hundred and thirty-five minutes, too long, a coffee is in order. He doesn’t want to drowse off and miss the answer to Bening’s question about vanishing.

  A woman with lapis-lidded, sleepy eyes, a gold-studded nostril, and a caste mark that looks like misapplied nail polish glances up expectantly when he enters. Her face appears disfigured by a mole on her cheek, but as he approaches the counter, Ned realizes that the mole is the microphone of her headset. “The usual?” she asks.

  He isn’t sure whether the question is addressed to someone she’s speaking with on the microphone or to him. She smiles, waiting for an answer.

  “Depends on what’s usual,” Ned says.

  In the hygienically bright lighting, the trays of frosted donuts look like replicas. He notices a surveillance camera and has a tactile sense of being filmed. It’s as if he’s stepped into a scene of infinitely repeated takes.

  “Sorry, I thought you were someone else,” she says. Her singsong accent would be perfectly in character if she were playing an Indian woman who works late nights at a Dunkin’ Donuts. “He always has a small black coffee and a Bavarian Kreme.”

  “Good by me,” Ned says. He’s impatient to step back out into the hypnotic night, but the woman takes her time, selecting a donut, artfully creasing the bag, then fitting with inordinate care the lid on the coffee cup that reads America Runs on Dunkin’.

  “Two eighty-two,” she says, and, when Ned digs into his jeans pocket, she adds, “He always gives me a fiver. Tells me, ‘Keep the change, donut girl.’”

  “Maybe that handsome guy you thought was me will come by later,” Ned says, handing her a five.

  “No,” she says, “no cabs tonight.”

  “He takes a cab here?”

  “Drives a cab. He’s never come in, just goes through drive-through. He always jokes I’m the most beautiful woman in the donut shop.”

  “Keep it,” Ned says, and she stuffs the change into a Styrofoam tip cup on the counter. He doesn’t call her donut girl. Their conversation feels scripted enough already. It was a mistake to stop here. Not only has the spell of what had come to seem like a quest been broken, but a night that seemed spontaneous now seems manufactured. The snow is real, Ned thinks, and the music. All is not lost.