Stuart Dybek - Paper Lantern - Love Stories

He unlocks the door and she follows him into the dark flat and strikes a match to light the twist of a joint. The eyes on the walls reflect the flame of the match. Cindy’s transparent gown glimmers. “They’re still all here,” she says. “Did you even get the fucking whitewash?”

“Been busy.” He accepts the joint, sucks the smoke, and holds it in.

“Don’t turn on the light,” she says. “Creeps me out when roaches run for cover.” She strikes matches until all the candle stubs ringed around the mattress are flickering.

Down the street, L trains traveling from opposite directions, jammed with fiesta revelers, arrive with a simultaneous screech at the muraled Leavitt station. The station’s stairs and their risers are a mosaic waterfall. After the trains racket off, regular street noise passes for quiet.

“Your bitches don’t like me,” she says, “and I don’t appreciate the way they’re glaring at my tits. You’re their master, make them disappear.”

“I’m no one’s master—including my own.”

“Don’t get vanilla on me, Rafael. How old are you? Twenty-one? I told you I’ll pay. What’s holding things up? You fall in love with your own creations, your own fantasies? They demand allegiance, don’t they? Hard to let go. It’s lonely without them adoring you, waiting when you come home at night. Look at the cummy stains on this mattress!”

She inhales as if sighing and lazily passes him the joint, and then, before he can react, draws her knife and flings it into Sleeping Beauty.

“Whoa!” he says, exhaling smoke.

“No scream? Blood should be gushing down the wall, puddling the floor. You got to get your red paint out if you want to see that. So, okay, no more passivity, we’re going to have a little private fiesta of wall-cleaning.”

She springs up, yanks the knife from Sleeping Beauty’s heart, and jams it into the painting’s face, then wheels into a practiced kickboxing move, and the heel of her stomper boot caves in one of Sleeping Beauty’s plaster breasts. She’s balletic in her fury. Rafael finishes the joint, while watching from the mattress what looks like a cardio routine run amok. She jabs, whirls, slashes, kicks, and plunges the knife, working herself into a breathless tantrum of destruction. Good thing whoever lives next door is probably at the fiesta.

On Blue Island, the Ferris wheel is stuck. Couples lean over the sides of their gondolas shouting, “Yo, get us down!” A carny worker shouts up, “Remain seated, please! Do not try climbing out!” “Yo, we going to have to fucking spend the night up here or what?” “No need to panic. The fire department is on the way!” It’s a still, sultry night, and the gondola at the very top—nearly the height of the steeple—has started to stir in the rhythmic way that lovers can get a parked car rocking. It catches the attention of a few people in the crowd. They’re pointing up.

Tonight, Sera Outlaw is a warrior—Joan of Arc, stripped of armor and waiting to suffer further indignities. Twisted coat hangers secure her ankles and bind her arms over her head. On the mattress beside her, Rafael sits baking one end of a straightened wire hanger over a candle. Along with the scent of weed and melted wax, and the musty updraft of the airshaft, the flat has acquired an acrid, metallic smell.

“What do you think you’re doing with that?” she asks. “Get your paints.”

“Too bad I’m out of marshmallows.”

“That’s a guy crack. I took you for someone who could get into the drama. You think the saints didn’t know submission’s how you get the attention we crave from God?”

“I’m setting the mood,” he says. “You told me when they threatened her, she like got off in Technicolor.”

“I don’t play with fire—at least not that way.”

“Somebody did,” he says, and gently lowers his lips to the brand on her shoulder.

“That was an initiation. I’m an Aries. Untie me, I mean fucking now.”

Instead, he blindfolds her with her white tank top. He fastens his mouth over hers, and then touches the tip of the clothes hanger to the luna moth. It’s not the end that he’s heated, but she screams with a force that makes him swallow as if she’s filled his mouth with electric-blue syrup. Her teeth clench on his lower lip and he hollers back.

On Blue Island, a kid who’s spent his last five tickets on the searchlight instead of buying a taco has trained the beacon on the gondola at the top of the stalled Ferris wheel. The dazzling beam doesn’t inhibit the couple who’s up there. They’ve ducked down and must be lying together flat on the bench seat, and can’t be seen from the ground. Still, the spotlight has made them stars—daring acrobats without a net, determined to put on a show. The gondola rocks recklessly, desperately, as their grand performance builds to a climax against the night sky. The crowd below cheers, even as sirens wail and the fire trucks run red lights down Eighteenth toward the fiesta. The firemen will be here any moment with their axes, bullhorns, and ladders. No one in the crowd is leaving until a ladder rises as it would to a blazing tenement window and, to riotous applause, the couple climb out and begin their descent back to the ordinary world.

Rafael presses her white tank top to his bloody mouth. “I was just messing with you,” he says. “You bit through my lip, you goddamn flake. Look what you did to my walls.”

“Untie me, you crazy dick. Do you know who you’re fucking with? I’m like totally connected. You have any idea who my uncle is?”

“You’re the one came to me to get painted. You don’t have to pay. I work better free.”

He slips on his respirator, conscious of his swollen lip, and, careful of her bound legs kicking at his balls, fits her visored helmet over her coral Mohawk while she spits nonstop curses. He starts with her bare feet: sprays them alchemy-gold. The black stompers standing beside the mattress get a coat of rubber-ducky yellow. Candy-cane stripes twirl up her legs and polka dots float from navel to the Cousteau-blue ruff inspired by her tongue. On the back of her helmet he paints a cherry-red honker and a white-lipped, watermelon-slice smile from which a blue tongue sticks out at the world. When she’s on the bike, a clown will appear to be looking backward. Raphael takes the precaution of dislodging the knife from where she’s rammed it into one of Cindy’s eyes after the spiderweb gown resisted her attempts to hack it to shreds.

“Even though you’re about as convincing a badass as Michael Jackson, something tells me it would be a mistake to return your blade just now,” he says. “Sorry I don’t have something to swap for it like a rubber horn to honk on your Harley.”

“I’ll be back for it with a nine-mil to honk up your ass, and not by myself, either. You just used up all your lives in one fucking evening.”

On Blue Island, the aerial ladder truck has successfully completed its rescue of all the couples on the Ferris wheel. By the time the ladder cranked to the top of the wheel, the highest gondola was hanging motionless, becalmed on the still night air. The crowd stared up, waiting for the disheveled, daredevil lovers to emerge. They would become fiesta legends, a Romeo and Juliet crisscrossed by beacons, their suspended, pearlescent boat sailing past the suffering Christs on all the steeples in the city, afloat on dark matter with novas exploding like flak, and the infinite blackness decaled with skyrockets and gold-glitter comets. Actually, when a fireman reached their gondola, they were gone. Where, who can say? Maybe the rocking gondola had been an optical illusion—a gentle sway in an indiscernible breeze—as seen from below. A few measly skyrockets pop and parachute down on Pilsen, a signal that the fiesta is over for tonight. Bulbs blink off in the shuttered stalls. With the mechanical mariachi music silenced, it’s possible to hear the accordion. The snow-cone vendor pushes his cart along Eighteenth dragging a trail of melted ice.