Paper Lantern

by Stuart Dybek

  Down the broken escalator, out the blue-lit lobby past the shuttered newsstand, through the frosty fog, hungry as strays we walk, still wearing our lab coats, to the Chinese restaurant around the corner.

  It’s a restaurant that used to be a Chinese laundry. When customers would come for their freshly laundered bundles, the cooking—wafting from the owner’s back kitchen through the warm haze of laundry steam—smelled so good that the customers began asking if they could buy something to eat as well. And so the restaurant was born. It was a carryout place at first, but they’ve since wedged in a few tables. None of us can read Chinese, so we can’t be sure, but since the proprietors never bothered to change the sign, presumably the Chinese characters still say it’s a Chinese laundry. Anyway, that’s how the people in the neighborhood refer to it—the Chinese Laundry, as in, “Man, I had a sublime meal at the Chinese Laundry last night.” Although they haven’t changed the sign, the proprietors have added a large red-ribbed paper lantern—their only nod to decor—that spreads its opaque glow across the steamy window.

  We sit at one of the five Formica tables—our favorite, beside the window—and the waitress immediately brings the menu and tea. Really, in a way, this is the best part: the ruddy glow of the paper lantern like heat on our faces, the tiny enameled teacups warming our hands, the hot tea scalding our hunger, and the surprising, welcoming heft of the menu, hand-printed in Chinese characters, with what must be very approximate explanations in English of some of the dishes, also hand-printed, in the black ink of calligraphers. Each time we come here the menu has grown longer. Once a dish has been offered, it is never deleted, and now the menu is pages and pages long, so long that we’ll never read through it all, never live long enough, perhaps, to sample all the food in just this one tucked-away neighborhood Chinese restaurant. The pages are unnumbered, and we can never remember where we left off reading the last time we were here. Was it the chrysanthemum pot, served traditionally in autumn when the flowers are in full bloom, or the almond jelly with lichees and loquats?

  “A poet wrote this menu,” Tinker says between sips of tea.

  “Yes, but if there’s a poet in the house, then why doesn’t this place have a real name—something like the Red Lantern—instead of merely being called the Chinese Laundry by default?” the Professor replies, wiping the steam from his glasses with a paper napkin from the dispenser on the table.

  “I sort of like the Chinese Laundry, myself. It’s got a solid, working-class ring. Red Lantern is a cliché—precious chinoiserie,” Tinker argues.

  They never agree.

  “Say, you two, I thought we were here to devour aesthetics, not debate them.”

  Here, there’s nothing of heaven or earth that can’t be consumed, nothing they haven’t found a way to turn into a delicacy: pine-nut porridge, cassia-blossom buns, fish-fragrance-sauced pigeon, swallow’s-nest soup (a soup indigenous to the shore of the South China Sea; nests of predigested seaweed from the beaks of swifts, the gelatinous material hardened to form a small, translucent cup). Sea-urchin roe, pickled jellyfish, tripe with ginger and peppercorns, five-fragrance grouper cheeks, cloud ears, spun-sugar apple, ginkgo nuts and golden needles (which are the buds of lilies), purple seaweed, bitter melon …

  Nothing of heaven and earth that cannot be combined, transmuted; no borders, in a wok, that can’t be crossed. It’s instructive. One can’t help nourishing the imagination as well as the body.

  We order, knowing we won’t finish all they’ll bring, and that no matter how carefully we ponder our choices we’ll be served instead whatever the cook has made today.

  * * *

  After supper, sharing segments of a blood orange and sipping tea, we ceremoniously crack open our fortune cookies and read aloud our fortunes as if consulting the I Ching.

  “Sorrow is born of excessive joy.”

  “Try another.”

  “Poverty is the common fate of scholars.”

  “Does that sound like a fortune to you?” Tinker asks.

  “I certainly hope not,” the Professor says.

  “When a finger points to the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger.”

  “What kind of fortunes are these? These aren’t fortune cookies, these are proverb cookies,” Tinker says.

  “In the Year of the Rat you will be lucky in love.”

  “Now, that’s more like it.”

  “What year is this?”

  “The Year of the Dragon, according to the place mat.”

  “Fuel alone will not light a fire.”

  “Say, did anyone turn off the Bunsen burner when we left?” The mention of the lab makes us signal for the check. It’s time we headed back. A new theory was brewing there when we left, and now, our enthusiasm rekindled, we return in the snow—it has begun to snow—through thick, crumbling flakes mixed with wafting cinders that would pass for snowflakes except for the way the wind is fanning their edges to sparks. A night of white flakes and streaming orange cinders, strange and beautiful, until we turn the corner and stare up at our laboratory.

  Flames occupy the top floor of the building. Smoke billows out of the skylight, from which the sooty moon has retreated. On the floor below, through radiant, buckling windows, we can see the mannequins from the dressmaker’s showroom. Naked, wigs on fire, they appear to gyrate lewdly before they topple. On the next floor down, in the instrument-repair shop, accordions wheeze in the smoke, violins seethe like green kindling, and the saxophones dissolve into a lava of molten brass cascading over a window ledge. While on the ground floor, in the display window, the animals in the taxidermist’s shop have begun to hiss and snap as if fire had returned them to life in the wild.

  We stare helplessly, still clutching the carryout containers of the food we were unable to finish from the blissfully innocent meal we sat sharing while our apparatus, our theories, our formulas, and years of research—all that people refer to as their “work”—were bursting into flame. Along empty, echoing streets, sirens are screaming like victims.

  Already a crowd has gathered.

  “Look at that seedy old mother go up,” a white kid in dreadlocks says to his girlfriend, who looks like a runaway waif. She answers, “Cool!”

  And I remember how, in what now seems another life, I watched fires as a kid—sometimes fires that a gang of us, calling ourselves the Matchheads, had set.

  I remember how, later, in another time, if not another life, I once snapped a photograph of a woman I was with as she watched a fire blaze out of control along a river in Chicago. She was still married then. Her husband, whom I’d never met, was in a veterans’ hospital—clinically depressed after the war in Vietnam. At least, that’s what she told me about him. Thinking back, I sometimes wonder if she even had a husband. She had come to Chicago with me for a fling—her word. I thought at the time that we were just “fooling around”—also her words, words we both used in place of others like “fucking” or “making love” or “adultery.” It was more comfortable, and safer, for me to think of things between us as fooling around, but when I offhandedly mentioned that to her she became furious, and instead of fooling around we spent our weekend in Chicago arguing, and ended up having a terrible time. It was a Sunday afternoon in early autumn, probably in the Year of the Rat, and we were sullenly driving out of the city. Along the north branch of the river, a factory was burning. I pulled over and parked, dug a camera out of my duffel, and we walked to a bridge to watch the fire.

  * * *

  But it’s not the fire itself that I remember, even though the blaze ultimately spread across the city sky like a dusk that rose from the earth rather than descended. The fire, as I recall it, is merely a backdrop compressed within the boundaries of the photograph I took of her. She has just looked away from the blaze, toward the camera. Her elbows lean against the peeling gray railing of the bridge. She’s wearing the black silk blouse that she bought at a secondhand shop on Clark Street the day before. Looking for clothes from the past in secondhand s
tores was an obsession of hers—“going junking,” she called it. A silver Navajo bracelet has slid up her arm over a black silk sleeve. How thin her wrists appear. There’s a ring whose gem I know is a moonstone on the index finger of her left hand, and a tarnished silver band around her thumb. She was left-handed, and it pleased her that I was, too, as if we both belonged to the same minority group. Her long hair is a shade of auburn all the more intense for the angle of late afternoon sunlight. She doesn’t look sullen or angry so much as fierce. Although later, studying her face in the photo, I’ll come to see that beneath her expression there’s a look less recognizable and more desperate: not loneliness, exactly, but aloneness—a look I’d seen cross her face more than once but wouldn’t have thought to identify if the photo hadn’t caught it. Behind her, ominous gray smoke plumes out of a sprawling old brick factory with the soon-to-be-scorched white lettering of GUTTMAN & CO. TANNERS visible along the side of the building.

  Driving back to Iowa in the dark, I’ll think that she’s asleep, as exhausted as I am from our strained weekend; then she’ll break the miles of silence between us to tell me that, disappointing though it was, the trip was worth it if only for the two of us on the bridge, watching the fire together. She loved being part of the excitement, she’ll say, loved the spontaneous way we swerved over and parked in order to take advantage of the spectacle—a conflagration the length of a city block, reflected over the greasy water, and a red fireboat, neat as a toy, sirening up the river, spouting white geysers while the flames roared back.

  Interstate 80 shoots before us in the length of our racing headlight beams. We’re on a stretch between towns, surrounded by flat black fields, and the candlepower of the occasional distant farmhouse is insufficient to illuminate the enormous horizon lurking in the dark like the drop-off at the edge of the planet. In the speeding car, her voice sounds disembodied, the voice of a shadow, barely above a whisper, yet it’s clear, as if the cover of night and the hypnotic momentum of the road have freed her to reveal secrets. There seemed to be so many secrets about her.

  She tells me that as the number of strangers attracted by the fire swelled into a crowd she could feel a secret current connecting the two of us, like the current that passed between us in bed the first time we made love, when we came at the same moment as if taken by surprise. It happened only that once.

  “Do you remember how, after that, I cried?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “You were trying to console me. I know you thought I was feeling terribly guilty, but I was crying because the way we fit together seemed suddenly so familiar, as if there were some old bond between us. I felt flooded with relief, as if I’d been missing you for a long time without quite realizing it, as if you’d returned to me after I thought I’d never see you again. I didn’t say any of that, because it sounds like some kind of channeling crap. Anyway, today the same feeling came over me on the bridge, and I was afraid I might start crying again, except this time what would be making me cry was the thought that if we were lovers from past lives who had waited lifetimes for the present to bring us back together, then how sad it was to waste the present the way we did this weekend.”

  I keep my eyes on the road, not daring to glance at her, or even to answer, for fear of interrupting the intimate, almost compulsive way she seems to be speaking.

  “I had this sudden awareness,” she continues, “of how the moments of our lives go out of existence before we’re conscious of having lived them. It’s only a relatively few moments that we get to keep and carry with us for the rest of our lives. Those moments are our lives. Or maybe it’s more like those moments are the dots and what we call our lives are the lines we draw between them, connecting them into imaginary pictures of ourselves. You know? Like those mythical pictures of constellations traced between stars. I remember how, as a kid, I actually expected to be able to look up and see Pegasus spread out against the night, and when I couldn’t it seemed like a trick had been played on me, like a fraud. I thought, Hey, if this is all there is to it, then I could reconnect the stars in any shape I wanted. I could create the Ken and Barbie constellations … I’m rambling…”

  “I’m following you, go on.”

  She moves closer to me.

  “I realized we can never predict when those few, special moments will occur,” she says. “How, if we hadn’t met, I wouldn’t be standing on a bridge watching a fire, and how there are certain people, not that many, who enter one’s life with the power to make those moments happen. Maybe that’s what falling in love means—the power to create for each other the moments by which we define ourselves. And there you were, right on cue, taking my picture. I had an impulse to open my blouse, to take off my clothes and pose naked for you. I wanted you. I wanted—not to ‘fool around.’ I wanted to fuck you like there’s no tomorrow against the railing of the bridge. I’ve been thinking about that ever since, this whole drive back.”

  I turn to look at her, but she says, “No … don’t look … Keep driving … Shhh, don’t talk … I’m sealing your lips.”

  I can hear the rustle beside me as she raises her skirt, and a faint smack of moistness, and then, kneeling on the seat, she extends her hand and outlines my lips with her slick fingertips.

  I can smell her scent; the car seems filled with it. I can feel the heat of her body radiating beside me, before she slides back along the seat until she’s braced against the car door. I can hear each slight adjustment of her body, the rustle of fabric against her skin, the elastic sound of her panties rolled past her hips, the faintly wet, possibly imaginary tick her fingertips are making. “Oh, baby,” she sighs. I’ve slowed down to fifty-five, and as semis pull into the passing lane and rumble by us, their headlights sweep through the car and I catch glimpses of her as if she’d been imprinted by lightning on my peripheral vision—disheveled, her skirt hiked over her slender legs, the fingers of her left hand disappearing into the V of her rolled-down underpants.

  “You can watch, if you promise to keep one eye on the road,” she says, and turns on the radio as if flicking on a night-light that coats her bare legs with its viridescence.

  What was playing? The volume was so low I barely heard. A violin from some improperly tuned-in university station, fading in and out until it disappeared into static—banished, perhaps, to those phantom frequencies where Bix Beiderbecke still blew on his cornet. We were almost to Davenport, on the river, the town where Beiderbecke was born, and one station or another there always seemed to be playing his music, as if the syncopated licks of Roaring Twenties jazz, which had burned Bix up so quickly, still resonated over the prairie like his ghost.

  “You can’t cross I-80 between Iowa and Illinois without going through the Beiderbecke Belt,” I had told her when we picked up a station broadcasting a Bix tribute on our way into Chicago. She had never heard of Bix until then and wasn’t paying him much attention until the DJ quoted a remark by Eddie Condon, an old Chicago guitarist, that “Bix’s sound came out like a girl saying yes.” That was only three days ago, and now we are returning, somehow changed from that couple who set out for a fling.

  We cross the Beiderbecke Belt back into Iowa, and as we drive past the Davenport exits the nearly deserted highway is illuminated like an empty ballpark by the bluish overhead lights. Her eyes closed with concentration, she hardly notices as a semi, outlined in red clearance lights, almost sideswipes us. The car shudders in the backdraft as the truck pulls away, its horn bellowing.

  “One eye on the road,” she cautions.

  “That wasn’t my fault.”

  We watch its taillights disappear, and then we’re alone in the highway dark again, traveling along my favorite stretch, where, in the summer, the fields are planted with sunflowers as well as corn, and you have to be on the alert for pheasants bolting across the road.

  “Baby, take it out,” she whispers.

  The desire to touch her is growing unbearable, and yet I don’t want to stop—don’t want the drive to
end.

  “I’m waiting for you,” she says. “I’m right on the edge just waiting for you.”

  We’re barely doing forty when we pass what looks like the same semi, trimmed in red clearance lights, parked along the shoulder. I’m watching her while trying to keep an eye on the road, so I don’t notice the truck pulling back onto the highway behind us or its headlights in the rearview mirror, gaining on us fast, until its high beams flash on, streaming through the car with a near-blinding intensity. I steady the wheel, waiting for the whump of the trailer’s vacuum as it hurtles by, but the truck stays right on our rear bumper, its enormous radiator grille looming through the rear window, and its headlights reflecting off our mirrors and windshield with a glare that makes us squint. Caught in the high beams, her hair flares like a halo about to burst into flame. She’s brushed her skirt down over her legs and looks a little wild.

  “What’s his problem? Is he stoned on uppers or something?” she shouts over the rumble of his engine, and then he hits his horn, obliterating her voice with a diesel blast.

  I stomp on the gas. We’re in the right lane, and, since he refuses to pass, I signal and pull into the outside lane to let him go by, but he merely switches lanes, too, hanging on our tail the entire time. The speedometer jitters over ninety, but he stays right behind us, his high beams pinning us like spotlights, his horn bellowing.