Stuart Dybek - Paper Lantern - Love Stories

In the years after the requiem, first Rafael’s mother deserted—paid off by the alderman whose bastard she was carrying, or so the rumor went—then one by one the extended family scattered into oblivion, until only Rafael was left in the care of Tia Marijane, his “beatnik aunt,” an exotic dancer half blinded by lasers, who spent her days painting watercolors of the cosmos and her nights praying the rosary to the opera station. Rafael liked to say he was raised by the spray-painted streets of Pilsen in the way that kids in fairy tales are raised by wolves. And now he’s MIA like the father he never knew. Those superpatriots Sly Stallone and Chuck Norris won’t be dispatched to liberate him. He’ll be lucky to make the Eleventh District’s list of missing persons. It runs in the family to disappear.

The vigil candle at St. Ann’s will melt into smoke, though at this moment, after midnight, its tiny flame has the locked church to itself and in the darkness emits a numinous green light that has the stained-glass windows facing the L tracks on Leavitt glowing from the inside out. If a soul flitted mothlike, lost in a once-familiar neighborhood, the light might attract it. An empty L, lit by a similar glow, rattles by like massive links on the chain of a ghost. Blocks away the ring of a phone echoes in a musty airshaft, and all along the street graffitied pay phones, most of them out of order and all of them obsolete and scheduled to be torn out, begin ringing. And then the steeple bells of three churches toll.

* * *

When a phone rings long enough it acquires a voice of its own. You hear it despite the pillow squashed over your ears or the boom box turned up until the guy next door starts hammering the wall. With your eyes closed each ring is a spray of color—karma-violet, clandestine-red, revolving-dome light blue—the auras of a voice that’s as beyond words as the night cries of urban animals—nighthawks wheeling above mercury-vapor lights, chained watchdogs that won’t stop barking, a rat tossing in the trap that’s managed only to break its back.

C ome on , man , fucking pick up.

The call seemed merely impatient at first, like Rafael’s gangbanger homey Milton who suspects that Rafael is skimming on their petty dope deals. They’d agreed on 50/50, Rafael supplying the supposedly aphrodisiac, hallucinogenic gummies called liana smuggled from a research study at the U of C, and Milton doing the pushing. I’d rather huff fumes like a punk than drop that shit, man , Milton said after he tried liana. Crazy fucking colors, closing your eyes just makes it worse, jungle cats jumping out of doorways, ese , you call that a love potion? He thought he’d mess with Rafael’s head in return by leaving a warning that the Devil’s Disciples were looking to express their displeasure with the recent apparitions of bare-assed girlfriends—phantom reflections on the cracked windshields of junkers and the soaped plate glass of deserted storefronts—that Rafael, masked like a surgeon, had spray-painted along Eighteenth, a street otherwise made sacred by its murals of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Yo, van Gogh of the Krylon can, when you gonna get that piece-of-shit answering machine fixed? I got a message might save your sorry ass. Why you can’t paint nothing but chicas? Do you always have to paint with your dick?

By late afternoon desperation has crept into the jangle of the Good Humor Man’s bells and into the gut of the plain-looking woman who’s been feeding a pay phone that rings and rings, then chucks back her loose change as if ejecting a cartridge. Cindy, the “older woman”—she’s thirty-two—who cleans condos on the Gold Coast, is calling from the Blue Island Laundromat, where, between the boil of washing machines and cyclone of dryers, it’s hot enough to faint. Rafael has immortalized the cracked walls in his flat with a portrait of her dressed in glass platform heels and a transparent gown that makes the wall phosphorescent in the dark as if painted with a spray distilled from a hatch of fireflies. Actually, it’s Cindy’s body showing through the gown that’s luminous.

Where’d you come up with that beautiful gown for me, babe?

It’s a web, he told her, spider silk stronger than steel. Once, I found a field of it.

He’d been tripping one Friday night, on his way to Motown in a hot-wired Buick to see the murals Diego Rivera had painted for Henry Ford. Radio playing whatever was hymning in the CD changer, and not a coin in his pocket, Rafael blew through tollgates and kept going until lost somewhere in Michigan, the Buick rolled to a stop, out of gas along a deserted road. Rafael stood wasted, knee-deep in mist, taking a leak, and suddenly, like a lens focusing, he could see how every weed and wildflower beyond the barbed-wire fence was connected as far as the horizon. Dawn shimmered through dew-beaded webs as if a goddess had tossed her gown over the gone-to-seed field. The spiders must have spun a new gown each night. He imagined all the silk that had been spun since the origin of spiders, unspooling into a single thread with the tensile strength to connect the cosmos. The murals in Motown could wait; he needed to hitch back to Pilsen while that thread still connected his mind.

If she could just talk to Rafael, Cindy would stop touching her tongue to her front teeth. She’s calling to tell him that her hotheaded, jealous old man, Darrell, is on to them. Jade, the stepdaughter who never accepted her, snitched to Darrell that when she got home early from school because of cramps, she caught Cindy passed out, and Rafael, high in the shower, flashed his thing before slamming the door. Cindy wants to say she knows that flashing part’s a lie, right? Ever since Cindy dropped some weight and started to fix herself up and feel alive again, Jade’s been competing with her. Her stepdaughter’s got a dirty mouth and each morning is a battle to keep her from going to school dressed like a slut. Darrell called them both whores, smacked them around, and punched Cindy in the stomach so she still can’t breathe. So Jade has run away from home and Cindy’s calling from the lavanderia on Blue Island because she’s got nowhere else to go. Her front teeth are chipped and her lip split where it collided with his wedding band. She hasn’t worked up the courage to look in the mirror, and oh, babe, Darrell slammed the clip into his army .45 and is looking for you.

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.