Paper Lantern

by Stuart Dybek

  “I told him it was my last night working here,” she says. “I just wanted to say goodbye.”

  * * *

  Ceil was right about the coffee—strong with a hint of licorice—but whoever his cab-driving doppelgänger is doesn’t have the same taste in donuts. Ned crushes the bag with the half-eaten Bavarian Kreme inside and lobs it into a wastebasket. He moves his laptop from the bedroom that serves as an office to an end table in the living room, inserts the DVD, and turns off the only lamp burning in his apartment. He tries to imagine Ceil alone in a dark movie theater years earlier, gazing at a panoramic screen that properly conveyed the big-sky landscape. Or maybe she saw it on a little seat-back screen, during a flight from London or Brussels. Back then, if she wasn’t traveling for her work with a human rights organization, they’d spend every weekend together. It surprises him that he never asked her where she’d seen the movie. He’s watching it now to see it through her eyes.

  From its early scenes on, Open Range is a love story between cowboys, a Brokeback Mountain without kisses. Driving longhorns before him, a grizzled Robert Duvall gallops across the iconic landscape and one of the cowpokes remarks, “Old Boss sure can cowboy, can’t he?” Costner answers, “Yeah, broke the mold after him.”

  Earlier, Ned had skimmed an interview online in which Costner said that “Open Range starts with language.” The movie’s dialogue is, as the reviews noted, a rehash of other westerns. Usually Ned avoids reading reviews beforehand, so as not to ruin any surprises, but there aren’t any surprises in Open Range, unless its degree of sentimentality qualifies. Costner’s Charley Waite has a cute mutt that follows him on the trail. Ned knows from the reviews that the dog is marked for death; he’d have guessed it anyway. It brings to mind Hondo, which Ned saw as a child, in which Apaches kill John Wayne’s dog, Sam—Ned still remembers the name. Despite all the people slaughtered in Hondo, the only loss Ned really felt was the dog’s. He wonders if a young Costner felt the same for Sam and never forgot the effect, both the loss and the justification of violence that went with it—clearly such savage dog-killers deserve extermination. Costner has already used the cruelty-to-canines ploy in Dances with Wolves. Open Range ups the ante. As if one murdered dog isn’t enough to establish that Charley Waite—no matter how many men he’s gunned down—has a gentle heart, there’s a scene where he risks his life to save a puppy from a flash flood.

  Annette Bening doesn’t appear until partway through. When she does, Ned is suddenly, nervously alert. He listens for the question about vanishing to be posed in Bening’s voice rather than in Ceil’s. It’s not a question for the early stages of a relationship, but Ned knows that the film has reached the point when that question, and its answer, must be coming.

  In the online interview, Costner said he thought Bening was “very heroic” for playing a woman her own age without wearing makeup. It gives her a mature, sympathetic look that’s fitting for the nurse she plays. Ned imagines that it’s a look Ceil could identify with, as she, too, was heroic about makeup. But then Ceil’s face was still unlined, except for a worry wrinkle across her forehead, visible when she wore her amber hair tied back. The corners of her eyes crinkled as if she were squinting against the wind when she smiled. Ned can visualize her pale blue, windblown eyes, but not her face. Ceil traveled regularly for work, and early in their relationship, when they didn’t see each other for a couple of weeks, he’d tell her that he was in danger of forgetting what she looked like. She’d pretend to be exasperated that he could forget so easily. He was kidding but only in part; after each absence the beauty of her face struck him anew. That was true of her nakedness as well. To remove her clothes was to release light. He’d watch her dressing or undressing in the mirror as if not daring to look directly into brightness. He wonders now what else he didn’t look at, what else he didn’t see.

  Ned doesn’t have a photo of her. On the few occasions when they took pictures, it was Ceil who snapped them. He recalls her fiddling with a new digital camera as they walked out onto a wave-sloshed pier under a bleaching summer sky. Ceil stopped before a small fish that looked as if a wave had flipped it onto a pier. Ned thought she was going to photograph it, but she gently slipped the fish back into the water. They’d gone only a step when an Asian man fishing from the pier turned and yelped, “Miss, you throw away my bait!” Ceil was annoyed when Ned laughed, but by the time they reached the end of the pier, where gulls swirled around a man cleaning salmon, they were both laughing. Ceil asked the man’s daughter to take a picture of them. They didn’t know then, smiling for the camera, that later that night, stoned on hashish, they’d end up in the emergency room. Ned asked for a copy of the picture taken on the pier, as he’d also asked for a picture of her for his birthday present. Ceil gave him instead an antique letter opener that she said would accrue in value. Ceil collected letter openers, pens, and paperweights, which she traded on eBay.

  It was that night, after Ned had talked Ceil through her near-death experience in the ER, that she told him about a long-distance affair she’d had before they met, with a man named Dom, who until then she’d only vaguely mentioned. He was a paleontologist who lived in Princeton and ran an online business selling fossils to museums and gift shops. She told Ned the story of how she regarded love at first sight as a cheesy cliché until it happened to her. Their affair had lasted for years and Ceil had subsequently sold or given away the fossils, geodes, gemstones, and meteorites he’d given her. She’d kept only a single rare fossil from the Cretaceous age, of mating dragonflies trapped in amber. Dom had photographed her naked so that during phone sex he could summon what she called “nonvanilla” poses—Dom had a thing for women and bottles. Ceil said posing for him was one of the most erotic experiences of her life. She described their nearly immediate rapport as “speaking the same language”; it was as if she’d met a male twin to a secret self she’d always felt was dirty. Dom, she said, had made it clean. Their sexual likeness had overridden their difference, including his right-wing politics. After she and Dom broke up, Ceil had asked more than once if she could come for a last visit, to watch while he deleted the intimate show he had directed, but he refused, claiming that it would be too painful for him to see her again. He promised to erase the photos. Still, Ceil worried that they were somewhere in cyberspace, posted on one or another of the websites Dom frequented.

  Listening to her, Ned understood how profoundly in love she’d been with the paleontologist and the authority the relationship still had in her life. It brought to mind an earlier night with Ceil, in bed, when she’d called him what he thought was “mister” in a little girl’s voice he hadn’t heard before and then apologized. Had she said “master”? Ned wishes he’d thought then to ask: That “same language” that you spoke, what language was it? He’d wondered, but didn’t ask, what it had taken for her to break that long relationship off.

  Tonight, he wonders if perhaps Ceil had been sleeping with them both. It would have been easy, given her frequent travel. He wonders if she could have been that devious, if in fact he’d been the catalyst she needed to end things with Dom, if he’d been a player in a love-triangle drama she was directing, a love triangle he hadn’t known he had a part in. He had felt uncomfortable having to press her for what was, in her word—or was it Dom’s?—a simple “vanilla” photo.

  It’s nearly three a.m. Costner and Bening have grown closer despite the lack of chemistry between them. As one reviewer remarked, “If the two of them were any more upstanding, they’d be trees.” Though Bening still hasn’t asked the question, she has revealed to Costner that she “always hoped somebody gentle and caring might come along.” The nurse she plays has up to this point abhorred violence, but when Costner replies, “Men are gonna get killed here today, Sue, and I’m gonna kill them, you understand that?” she submissively answers, “Yes.” After the climactic shoot-’em-up, modeled on the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in which the bad guys are wasted, Costner asks her again, “Those killings, they don�
�t give you pause?”

  “I’m not afraid of you, Charley,” she answers. It’s the moment in the film that reviews found least credible, given Bening’s character. But Ned thinks that the film has finally got something right. Afraid? No, she’s turned on, thrilled, ready to brag about her gunslinger. Peace be damned, she just wants to get laid.

  Ned wonders what Ceil, who regarded George Bush as a war criminal, would have said about Bening’s response. Often the best part of going to a movie together was the time afterward, when they’d stop for a drink and talk about what they had just seen. Tonight, Ned has carried on a one-way conversation with Ceil, as if she were watching it beside him. He’s had many others with her since she vanished. He wishes he could make them stop, but they’re growing more frequent, as if the lengthening of her absence is making their phantom dialogue more compulsive.

  Costner shyly asks Bening for a kiss. Killing is easy for cowboys; it’s smooching that takes nerve. The film is winding down, the time for asking is running out. But she doesn’t ask. Ned watches as they ride out of town together—Duvall, Costner, Bening—under the big sky. Ned listens for her question. She doesn’t ask it. After all that killing in support of a man’s right to the open range, Duvall says that he’s tired of the open range. He’d like to run a saloon in town, and maybe Costner could be his partner. Costner tells Bening he’ll be back. They exchange happily-ever-after smiles. She turns back toward town, and Costner and Duvall ride off toward the dogies they’ve left on the open range.

  Ned watches the credits roll.

  He feels confused, then tricked. He has an impulse to replay the whole dull film. Could he have somehow missed the line? He vividly remembers that conversation with Ceil being predicated on the question about vanishing. He knows he didn’t make that up. He can’t understand why Ceil would have invented it, ascribing it and the answer to lines from a second-rate movie. There has to have been a mistake. Could she have conflated Open Range with some other film? He remembers her having complained that she wasn’t sleeping well; she used to wake beside him in the middle of the night from dreams that made her moan but dissolved before she could describe them. Maybe she had dreamed the question. It’s another thing about her that he’ll never understand. He ejects the DVD and logs off.

  Are you sure you want to shut down your computer now?

  The screen goes wordlessly blue, and then blinks off, leaving the apartment lit only by the reflection of the streetlights in the falling snow. The blank windowpanes are fogging from the bottom up. He isn’t tired. Ceil was right about the coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts. He tries again to summon her face. If the myth about a hundred words for snow were true, there’d be a word for snow-erasing-its-own-memory. He has an urge to open the window and let the wind and snow blow in. He tugs at the handles, hammers the sash, but the window won’t budge. The cold pane mists with his breath and body heat, and, when he wipes away the steam, his reflection peeps in darkly. He wonders if a person can forget his own face. He wonders if his cabbie double ever showed up for “the usual.” All the windows but one are dark in the apartment building across the way. Lines he hasn’t thought about for years, from a poem in Doctor Zhivago, come to mind:

  It snowed and snowed, the whole world over …

  A candle burned on the table;

  A candle burned.

  It doesn’t seem incongruous that the window across the way is lit not by the halo of a candle but by a bluish glow—someone watching television in the middle of the night or working at a computer, perhaps surfing websites. What if, in the vastness of cyberspace, whoever is up across the street should encounter an image of Ceil? Is it snowing the whole world over, even in Princeton, where the paleontologist may still be at his computer, filing through a gallery of pictures of ex-girlfriends, like a museum curator checking the inventory of his fossils and specimens preserved in amber, assessing the value they’ve accrued, before settling on a photo of Ceil?

  Dom was burned out by too many field trips, Ceil told Ned, and he refused to travel unless it couldn’t be avoided—travel was one of their many differences. So every few weeks she’d made the trip to Princeton. She marveled about the thousands of miles she had logged over the years to be with him. Between visits, they’d talked on the phone at least once a day. They had broken up over the phone, and she said she’d thought that going to see Dom one last time in person would be the “classy” thing to do. Dom offered to meet her at a hotel in New York but refused to have her stay at his house, and Ceil said she’d already spent too much time with him in hotel rooms.

  Suppose Dom had allowed that journey back to Princeton, Ned wonders.

  He sees her traveling to her old lover one last time along a track she knows by heart, the one she’s ridden from Penn Station, or from the Newark airport, sometimes from Philadelphia. Wherever she begins, she disembarks at Princeton Junction and takes the shuttle called the Dinky. This time he isn’t there waiting at the station to pick her up. She takes a cab along a familiar cobbled street, past the fudge shop and their breakfast café and the antique shop where she’s foraged for letter openers, to a Victorian house where a wardrobe of hers still hangs in the closet of the master bedroom, and where on a velvet window seat shaded by filmy curtains the photographs were taken. She expects him to simply delete the file, but he opens it, and there the two of them are, preserved in digital light: Dom—though he isn’t visible in the photo, she can see him—and herself, more real on the screen than she feels at this moment, younger, naked, spreading her legs at his command. Remember that afternoon, Ceil, he asks, how intense we were? What’s happened to us? Remember the story you loved telling about how embarrassed you were when we first met because you could hardly talk for how I’d impressed you? What did you really come back here for today?

  I need to be sure you’ve erased them.

  But surely you know I could have hidden files and copies on disks and travel drives.

  You wouldn’t lie to my face.

  Would you lie to mine? Is there someone else? Do you think I can’t sense it? You couldn’t leave me on your own. This horseshit about differences between us—as if they ever mattered to you with your clothes off. You’re most devious to yourself. Do you think you’ll find our kind of intimacy again? We’ll be for each other an absence, like a phantom limb. You’ll look for me in others, and they’ll feel the overlap.

  Erase them.

  Do you love me?

  Please, you know this has nothing to do with my loving you.

  Please who?

  Please, master.

  So, poof! One gone. You think erasing a replica erases us? This one’s always been my favorite. I’ve studied that little death on your pretty face a thousand times. I’m going to close my eyes and press delete. Tell me when you’ve disappeared. Gone?

  Yes. Thank you. Now please erase them from Trash.

  * * *

  “What would you do if I vanished?”

  “You mean like—poof!—suddenly you’re not there? So where are you? Lost in the ether? Traveling through time? In cyberspace?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Answer the question.”

  “Okay, I’ll play. I’d ride to the ends of the earth, to the silver mountains of the moon. Or maybe they’re borax.”

  “You think you’d find me there?”

  “I’d follow your footprints across borax craters, ford molten rivers that parted like mercury, a starry sky guiding the way. On a summer day I’d walk out on a pier that juts out to infinity, and when I reached the end, if you weren’t there, over the laughter of gulls I’d call your name, and if you didn’t answer I’d follow the little fish you saved and he’d lead me to you.”

  “He’d lead you to nowhere.”

  “Then, one night in winter, I’d pass through the arch of a Great Gate of Snow and on the other side I’d be back in time in the city when it was ours. When all could never be lost. I’d hail the only cab out late. The cabbie would study me in the rearview, and in the mi
rror I’d see that his eyes were mine. I wouldn’t have to tell him where to go. We’d drive from lighted corner to lighted corner for nights until I found the most beautiful woman in all of Dunkin’ Donuts. The coffee’s good here, you’d tell me.”

  “They do have good coffee, but I wouldn’t be there.”

  “I’d hire a hypnotist who specialized in negotiating the release of alien abductees. I’d search the hidden records for all the secret prisons of the CIA. I’d wait in long lines at the Department of Missing Persons…”

  “That’s not the answer.”

  “After a while, I’d do nothing but go day by day without you. Sometimes I’d remember something you said, and have another one-way conversation. I’d walk around secretly talking to you, wondering where you were and what you were doing. I’d tell myself that wherever you’d gone I wanted you to be happy.”

  “You need to work on a better answer.”

  “What was the question again?”

  “What would you do if I vanished?”

  “But life is never that simple. One doesn’t just vanish. There’s always a why, or at least a context. You suddenly moved away in the middle of the night. Changed your unlisted phone number. Left no forwarding address so that mail was returned and e-mails disappeared into whatever graveyard file they go to. Was it amnesia? An overdose of vanishing cream? Did you meet someone else? Another catalyst? You’re not the suicidal type, thank God, but still … or by ‘vanish’ could you really have thought that you’d be erased from my memory?”

  “Say I met someone else.”

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

  Paper Lantern

  We were working late on the time machine in the little makeshift lab upstairs. The moon was stuck like the whorl of a frozen fingerprint to the skylight. In the back alley, the breaths left behind by yowling toms converged into a fog slinking out along the streets. Try as we might, our measurements were repeatedly off. In one direction, we’d reached the border at which clairvoyants stand gazing into the future, and in the other we’d gone backward to the zone where the present turns ghostly with memory and yet resists quite becoming the past. We’d been advancing and retreating by smaller and smaller degrees until it had come to seem as if we were measuring the immeasurable. Of course, what we really needed was some new vocabulary of measurement. It was time for a break.