by Stuart Dybek
“Is he crazy?” she shouts.
I know what’s happening. After he came close to sideswiping us outside Davenport, he must have gone on driving down the empty highway with the image of her illuminated by those bluish lights preying on his mind. Maybe he’s divorced and lonely, maybe his wife is cheating on him—something’s gone terribly wrong for him, and, whatever it is, seeing her exposed like that has revealed his own life as a sorry thing, and that realization has turned to meanness and anger.
There’s an exit a mile off, and he sees it, too, and swings his rig back to the inside lane to try and cut me off, but with the pedal to the floor I beat him to the right-hand lane, and I keep it floored, although I know I can’t manage a turnoff at this speed. He knows that, too, and stays close behind, ignoring my right-turn signal, laying on his horn as if to warn me not to try slowing down for this exit, that there’s no way of stopping sixty thousand pounds of tractor-trailer doing over ninety.
But just before we hit the exit I swerve back into the outside lane, and for a moment he pulls even with us, staying on the inside as we race past the exit so as to keep it blocked. That’s when I yell to her, “Hang on!” and pump the brakes, and we screech along the outside lane, fishtailing and burning rubber, while the truck goes barreling by, its air brakes whooshing. The car skids onto the gravel shoulder, kicking up a cloud of dust, smoky in the headlights, but it’s never really out of control, and by the time the semi lurches to a stop, I have the car in reverse, veering back to the exit, hoping no one else is speeding toward us down I-80.
It’s the Plainview exit, and I gun into a turn, north onto an empty two-lane, racing toward someplace named Long Grove. I keep checking the mirror for his headlights, but the highway behind us stays dark, and finally she says, “Baby, slow down.”
The radio is still playing static, and I turn it off.
“Christ!” she says. “At first I thought he was just your everyday flaming asshole, but he was a genuine psychopath.”
“A real lunatic, all right,” I agree.
“You think he was just waiting there for us in his truck?” she asks. “That’s so spooky, especially when you think he’s still out there driving west. It makes you wonder how many other guys are out there, driving with their heads full of craziness and rage.”
It’s a vision of the road at night that I can almost see: men, not necessarily vicious—some just numb or desperately lonely—driving to the whining companionship of country music, their headlights too scattered and isolated for anyone to realize that they’re all part of a convoy. We’re a part of it, too.
“I was thinking, Oh, no, I can’t die now, like this,” she says. “It would be too sexually frustrating—like death was the ultimate tease.”
“You know what I was afraid of,” I tell her. “Dying with my trousers open.”
She laughs and continues laughing until there’s a hysterical edge to it.
“I think that truck driver was jealous of you. He knows you’re a lucky guy tonight,” she gasps, winded, and kicks off her sandal in order to slide a bare foot along my leg. “Here we are together, still alive.”
I bring her foot to my mouth and kiss it, clasping her leg where it’s thinnest, as if my hand were an ankle bracelet, then slide my hand beneath her skirt, along her thigh to the edge of her panties, a crease of surprising heat, from which my finger comes away slick.
“I told you,” she moans. “A lucky guy.”
I turn onto the next country road. It’s unmarked, not that it matters. I know that out here, sooner or later, it will cross a gravel road, and when it does I turn onto the gravel, and after a while turn again at the intersection of a dirt road that winds into fields of an increasingly deeper darkness, fragrant with the rich Iowa earth and resonating with insect choirs amassed for one last Sanctus. I’m not even sure what direction we’re traveling in any longer, let alone where we’re going, but when my high beams catch a big turtle crossing the road I feel we’ve arrived. The car rolls to a stop on a narrow plank bridge spanning a culvert. The bridge—not much longer than our car—is veiled on either side by overhanging trees, cottonwoods, probably, and flanked by cattails as high as the drying stalks of corn in the acres we’ve been passing. The turtle, his snapper’s jaw unmistakable in the lights, looks mossy and ancient, and we watch him complete his trek across the road and disappear into the reeds before I flick off the headlights. Sitting silently in the dark, we listen to the crinkle of the cooling engine, and to the peepers we’ve disturbed starting up again from beneath the bridge. When we quietly step out of the car, we can hear frogs plopping into the water. “Look at the stars,” she whispers.
“If Pegasus was up there,” I say, “you’d see him from here.”
“Do you have any idea where we are?” she asks.
“Nope. Totally lost. We can find our way back when it’s light.”
“The backseat of a car at night, on a country road—adultery has a disconcerting way of turning adults back into teenagers.”
We make love, then manage to doze off for a while in the backseat, wrapped together in a checkered tablecloth we’d used once on a picnic, which I still had folded in the trunk.
* * *
In the pale early light I shoot the rest of the film on the roll: a close-up of her, framed in part by the line of the checkered tablecloth, which she’s wearing like a shawl around her bare shoulders, and another, closer still, of her face framed by her tangled auburn hair, and out the open window behind her, velvety cattails blurred in the shallow depth of field. A picture of her posing naked outside the car in sunlight that streams through countless rents in the veil of the cottonwoods. A picture of her kneeling on the muddy planks of the little bridge, her hazel eyes glancing up at the camera, her mouth, still a yard from my body, already shaped as if I’ve stepped to her across that distance.
What’s missing is the shot I never snapped—the one the trucker tried to steal, which drove him over whatever edge he was balanced on, and which, perhaps, still has him riding highways, searching each passing car from the perch of his cab for that glimpse he won’t get again—her hair disheveled, her body braced against the car door, eyes squeezed closed, lips twisted, skirt hiked up, pelvis rising to her hand.
Years after, she called me out of nowhere. “Do you still have those photos of me?” she asked.
“No,” I told her, “I burned them.”
“Good,” she said, sounding pleased—not relieved so much as flattered—“I just suddenly wondered.” Then she hung up.
But I lied. I’d kept them all these years, along with a few letters—part of a bundle of personal papers in a manila envelope that I moved with me from place to place. I had them hidden away in the back of a file cabinet in the laboratory, although certainly they had no business being there. Now what I’d told her was true: they were fueling the flames.
* * *
Outlined in firelight, the kid in dreadlocks kisses the waif. His hand glides over the back of her fringed jacket of dirty white buckskin and settles on the torn seat of her faded jeans. She stands on tiptoe on the tops of his gym shoes and hooks her fingers through the empty belt loops of his jeans so that their crotches are aligned. When he boosts her closer and grinds against her she says, “Wow!” and giggles. “I felt it move.”
“Fires get me horny,” he says.
The roof around the skylight implodes, sending a funnel of sparks into the whirl of snow, and the crowd ahs collectively as the beakers in the laboratory pop and flare.
Gapers have continued to arrive down side streets, appearing out of the snowfall as if drawn by a great bonfire signaling some secret rite: gangbangers in their jackets engraved with symbols, gorgeous transvestites from Wharf Street, stevedores, and young sailors, their fresh tattoos contracting in the cold. The homeless, layered in overcoats, burlap tied around their feet, have abandoned their burning ash cans in order to gather here, just as the shivering, scantily clad hookers have abandoned their neon co
rners; as the Guatemalan dishwashers have abandoned their scalding suds; as a baker, his face and hair the ghostly white of flour, has abandoned his oven.
Open hydrants gush into the gutters; the street is seamed with deflated hoses, but the firemen stand as if paired off with the hookers—as if for a moment they’ve become voyeurs like everyone else, transfixed as the brick walls of our lab blaze suddenly lucent, suspended on a cushion of smoke, and the red-hot skeleton of the time machine begins to radiate from the inside out. A rosy light plays off the upturned faces of the crowd like the glow of an enormous red lantern—a paper lantern that once seemed fragile, almost delicate, but now obliterates the very time and space it once illuminated. A paper lantern raging out of control with nothing but itself left to consume.
“Brrrr.” The Professor shivers, wiping his fogged glasses as if to clear away the opaque gleam reflecting off their lenses.
“Goddamn cold, all right,” Tinker mutters, stamping his feet.
For once they agree.
The wind gusts, fanning the bitter chill of night even as it fans the flames, and instinctively we all edge closer to the fire.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to the editors of the magazines that first accepted these stories.
And a thank-you that spans years to Elisabeth Sifton and Amanda Urban.
Also, I wish to express my gratitude to the MacArthur Foundation for a fellowship that provided the time to write this book.
ALSO BY STUART DYBEK
FICTION
Ecstatic Cahoots
I Sailed with Magellan
The Coast of Chicago
Childhood and Other Neighborhoods
POETRY
Streets in Their Own Ink
Brass Knuckles
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2014 by Stuart Dybek
All rights reserved
First edition, 2014
The stories in this book originally appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications: “Blowing Shades” in Ontario Review (1997) and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses (1999); “The Caller” in DoubleTake (1995); “Four Deuces” in A Public Space (2012); “If I Vanished” in The New Yorker (2007); “Oceanic” in Zoetrope (2011); “Paper Lantern” in The New Yorker (1995), Best American Short Stories (1996), The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (1996), and The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1999); “Seiche” in Granta (2009); “Tosca” in Tin House (2012); and “Waiting” in Zoetrope (2009).
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dybek, Stuart, 1942–
[Short stories. Selections]
Paper Lantern: Love Stories / Stuart Dybek. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-374-14644-3 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-374-71054-5 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS3554.Y3 A6 2014
813'.54—dc23
2013034414
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