Stuart Dybek - Paper Lantern - Love Stories

Alchemy-gold footprints trail down the stairs and out the doorway. Her motorcycle is parked illegally on the sidewalk where she left it. Some joker returning from the fiesta in a party mood has tied a pink heart-shaped balloon to its handlebars. The streets resound with the pipes-and-tambourine laughter of blitzed revelers heading toward the L station. The searchlight, shooting from Blue Island, sweeps along the apartment buildings. A painted woman sits on her motorcycle, staring up as the beam crosses Rafael’s dark third-story window. He stands half naked, looking out, the bluish beam smoldering with the smoke of his cigarette, each slat in the blinds a slash along his body.

“You motherfucker,” she yells at the window, in a voice nothing like that soprano in the airshaft, “I’m coming back packing, when you least expect it. You’re going to beg. You’re already a dead man, asshole.” She revs her bike as if the snarling engine knows words she can’t find and guns along the sidewalk, sending revelers jumping out of the way and shouting at the goofy face looking back at them, “ Pendeja loca! ”

The whine of the engine grows increasingly distant but refuses to disappear, as if someone were riding in furious, self-destructive circles at the edge of consciousness, a 500cc Buell Blast boring into sleep, invading dreams, and morphing into the ringing of a phone.

* * *

Squash a sweaty pillow over your ears, but the reverberations continue. The call is no longer pleading. When it’s hopeless to plead, there’s rage. When it was hopeless to rage, Rafael stood staring at the mattress he no longer could lie on. The silhouette of her body was visible, shaped by the pointillist spray around it, like the impression of a body chalked on a sidewalk by police. He lugged the mattress to the bathtub, squirted it with lighter fluid, watched the flames ignite and wither. When the bathroom filled with smoke, he turned on the water taps, and sat beside the airshaft window.

He wasn’t going to sleep anyway, so why not stuff some clothes in the backpack with his paints and, from the can of bandages, take the skinny tube of dope-deal dollars and, checking that the street is empty, walk off? The extension lamp of a mechanic working on the Ferris wheel to the wheeze of an accordion illuminates the street behind. The street ahead is unlit as if there were a power outage. It must be that the strobing vigil light in St. Ann’s has guttered out. Still, within the darkened sanctuary, the resident saints and angels continue their supplications. One must not think that a person who is suffering is not praying. Oh, how everything that is suffered with love is healed again.

Wait alone on the L platform for an empty night train, the kind of train that clatters through sleep, a train boarded by nightmares and dreams masked like luchadores , indistinguishable from one another in their babushkas, fedoras, respirators, and dark glasses. When it reaches the end of the line it won’t stop. It goes by I’m Sorry Street, by Forgive Me Avenue, by Fucked Up Again Boulevard. By the time it passes What Have I Done, it’s traveling too fast. Maybe this once it will hurtle by fate and you’ll be free. And then what? Rafael might have boarded that train, if he could have thought of where to get off.

Listen, the telephone, driven mad with rejection, doesn’t even want to be answered any longer. It is like an alarm that, rather than a warning, wishes to be the thing it’s warning against—a break-in or a fire burning out of control. The caller’s ring is like an ambulance siren that wants to be the accident itself—a head-on collision or a hit-and-run, a mugging, a drive-by.

The women on the wall with their hacked faces and staved-in bodies hear it ring but don’t answer. Maybe they are calling themselves. Cindy locked for the night in the laundromat, too weak with internal bleeding to speak, or her lost daughter, Jade, calling Rafael’s number in the hope that her stepmother might answer, or Brianna, OD’d on pills, calling to say adiós through the plastic bag she’s pulled over her head, or Rafael’s old tia , who holds the receiver to the radio so for once in his life he can hear Pavarotti hit that high C in Turandot , or his mother calling to say that his half brother, Gabriel, was stillborn, or his father calling from Hanoi; nuns, priests, teachers, cops, parole officers, social workers, the Devil’s Disciples, Darrell, all in a snaky line waiting before a gutted pay phone for their turn.

Now that it’s gone on long enough to assume a life of its own, the call never wants to stop. It’s too late for talk now anyway, and if someone, anyone, answered, suddenly picked up the receiver and said hello, there’d be no answer in return.

“Hello? Hello … who is this? Who the fuck are you? What fucking business do you have calling and calling at this hour? Don’t you get it: nobody’s fucking home.”

Not even the breath of an obscene breather. Only silence.

“After all that fucking ringing, say something … anything … please, talk to me.”

1

It was probably fair to say, as beachgoers did, that the Lifeguard had returned to duty too soon. Though the shark attack occurred long ago, his wounds had yet to heal. Was it to compensate for his reduced physical stature that his guard tower rose higher than such structures normally did? Its ointment-white paint peeled like a sunburn. Sunbathers avoided the shadow it cast across the sand, not to mention the furrowed trail of rusted blood between the chair and the water. After the beaches closed on Labor Day, and the crew of lifeguards turned in their emergency-orange tank tops and went back to school or to less glamorous jobs, he remained behind with the ghost crabs and shorebirds. The prints of terns and sandpipers mottled the sand around the high throne where he sat, silhouetted against an Indian-summer sky, like a king deserted by his subjects, his realm of sand and water reflected across his mirror lenses, a silent silver whistle clenched between his teeth.

Local legend had it that he was awaiting the return of the dolphin that had saved him, in order to express his thanks. He’d been in shock from loss of blood when the dolphin ferried him ashore, and in his confused state the Lifeguard thought a mermaid had rescued him. Yet some rejected that story as apocryphal. They quoted eyewitness accounts that it wasn’t a dolphin but a child’s blow-up rubber frog—the toy the Lifeguard had swum out to save and then washed back up in.

It was a story in flux. In another version the Lifeguard’s vigil had nothing to do with a dolphin, let alone a rubber frog, but with a drowned girl he’d revived with the kiss of life. The experience was for him a kind of conversion—Saul on the road to Damascus. At that impressionable age when boys entering manhood assess their futures, the Lifeguard became convinced he possessed a gift for saving lives. No matter the cost, he’d found his destiny.

On midnights lit by the palpations of driftwood fires, when ghost stories were passed around a circle along with charred marshmallows, reefers, and jug wine, his tale was whispered like a secret. After the Lifeguard pulled the drowned girl from the water, his frantic attempt at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation failed to stir her. At last, exhausted and defeated, he stood dizzily and stared at her lying at his feet. Her eyes were closed as if she were asleep, her lips parted as if uttering a silent Oh lodged in her throat like a bite of poisoned apple. Her bikini top had come undone, exposing a breast whose nipple, plum with cold, should have been puckered but looked erect. She was so lovely that he dropped back to his knees, gathered her wet, sun-streaked hair in a fist, and brought her lips to his, this time in disregard for prescribed CPR technique. Their teeth collided, he jabbed his tongue into her cold mouth, traveled the unevenness of her gumline, pausing to examine a chipped canine, and the ridges behind her teeth, then flicked his tongue across the pores of hers, and felt her respond. The Lifeguard had never believed the rumors—if he’d heard them at all—about a flat-chested, nondescript girl in a hot-pink bikini who became seductively beautiful only after drowning. She drowned herself at beaches up and down the coast so that lifeguards might resuscitate her, and in the process she swallowed their souls. Even if he had heard the rumors, the kiss would have obliterated caution. It flowed between them, composed of breath, time, and briny spit, and seemed to surge into a life force that was breathless, timeless, and oceanic. He didn’t realize until too late that the climactic urge to surrender to it was his soul being sucked from his body.