Stuart Dybek - Paper Lantern - Love Stories

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 mirror 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.”

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.

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.