Black Swan Rising

by Lee Carroll

  Jay turned a bright red at my praise and slumped down even farther in his chair. Then he muttered something and fled the table.

  “What did I say wrong?” I asked Becky.

  “Nothing. It’s just . . . I think Jay might have been thinking of you when he wrote that song, and I guess he didn’t like hearing you describe his feelings as unrequited longing for the unapproachable love object.”

  “Me? Why would he be thinking of me . . .” I stammered to a halt under Becky’s glare. “Shit. I’m an idiot.”

  “Yeah, well . . . you’ve had a lot on your mind.”

  “Should I go talk to him?”

  “Nah, I’d leave him alone for now. I think he likes to brood. Maybe we’ll get some new songs out of him.”

  I followed Becky’s advice and left Jay alone. I couldn’t help thinking as I walked to the hospital, though, that I’d taken the coward’s way out. Jay was my best friend. Even more than Becky, he’d been the one who held me together after my mother died. For a whole year he’d spent every day after school with me, just hanging out while I made jewelry, ready to take me to a sci-fi film fest at the Film Forum or willing to order in Chinese food and watch old movies with me on TCM. He was the perfect company for the emotionally strung-out zombie I’d become. Restful, not too cheery, always available. I had never thought of him in a romantic light, but then I hadn’t been thinking of anyone in that light. Although I’d had no shortage of interested men in college, none of them lasted very long. The artists I met in school and through the gallery always proved unreliable and too insecure, and the corporate types I met in the auction houses and galleries seemed to be missing something. Or maybe I was the one missing something. It occurred to me now that many of the guys I’d dated over the last ten years had been perfectly nice—some were even more than nice—but I had failed to feel anything for any one of them. And now the first man I did feel something for was a four-hundred-year-old vampire. What was wrong with me?

  I was so wrapped up in my self-pity that as I rounded the corner of Twelfth Street and Seventh Avenue, I ran straight into a man coming the other way. He was middle-aged and well dressed in a Barbour raincoat and tweed cap, carrying a folded Wall Street Journal and a Starbucks coffee cup.

  Before I could get out an apology, he snarled at me, “You’re going the wrong way, asshole!”

  I was so taken aback—both by the obscenity and the notion that there was a right and wrong way to walk on the street—that I stared openmouthed and speechless as he stomped off. I looked around for a sympathetic glance from a passerby, but although the corner was busy, everyone who passed was sunk too deeply into his or her own thoughts to have noticed the incident. Everyone. I stood on the corner for five minutes and didn’t see a single person walk by who looked happy. Even the art students on their way to Parsons looked weighed down by their portfolios. True, the day was the coldest we’d had so far this winter. Still, I couldn’t remember a gloomier mood in the city since just after 9/11, and even then there’d been a feeling of shared tragedy, not this insular brooding. Was it the recession, I wondered, or was it the influence of Dee’s demons making itself felt on the city?

  I felt the same oppression inside the hospital. I ran for an open elevator, but no one in it held the door for me. I overheard a doctor yelling at a nurse for bringing the wrong chart and a woman snapping at her bleary-eyed toddler to “stop whining.” The instant I walked into my father’s room I could see that the malaise hanging over the city had crept into him. He looked shrunken lying in his bed, his eyes hooded and heavy, staring blankly at the ceiling. He didn’t stir at the sound of my arrival, but when I said his name, his head swiveled around and he managed a weak smile.

  “There’s my beautiful daughter,” he said. I could have wept for the bravery of that smile after all the gloom I’d seen out on the streets, but I managed to smile back instead.

  “Hey, Dad, look what I brought.” I took out Santé’s painting from the portfolio I’d brought it in and propped it up on the chair by his bed. Instantly his face brightened.

  “Would you look at that? She looks exactly like she did when I first met her.” He furrowed his brow. “How did Santé capture her like that?”

  “Ober—Obie Smith said Santé painted this from a dream.”

  My father laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough. I poured him a glass of water from the plastic carafe on the tray beside his bed. When he’d sipped some water, my father wagged his finger at me. “That Santé, he was full of bullshit. I know where he got this picture. There’s a photograph of your mother as a young girl in France. It’s in my bedroom on my dresser. You know the one.”

  “No, Dad, I’m not sure I do.”

  He waved my protestation away. “Of course you do. Santé and your mother loved to talk about France. She was always telling him he should go . . . that he must paint in the south where van Gogh and Cézanne painted. She must have shown him that picture of her in the village where she grew up . . .” His voice drifted away. “Santé never made it to France, though.”

  “Did you and Mom ever go back to the village she came from?” I asked, hoping to distract him from thinking about Santé.

  “No.” He shook his head. “We went to Paris a dozen times and I suggested we travel south, but she said she would never forgive the people of the village where she grew up.”

  “Why not?”

  “I think because they didn’t protect her mother from the Germans. She never would tell me the whole story, but I know her mother died in the last years of the war. She didn’t want to talk about it and I respected that.”

  “Of course you did,” I said, taking my father’s hand. My father could barely bring himself to talk about the family he’d lost in the war.

  “Sometimes I wonder if I really knew Margot at all.”

  “What are you talking about, Dad? No one knew her better.”

  He shook his head. “That day she died . . .” His voice came out as a croak. He stopped and licked his lips and motioned for me to hand him the water glass.

  “Don’t, Dad, don’t talk about that now.”

  He took a sip from the straw, his cheeks collapsing. He’d lost weight since he’d been in the hospital. It made him look older.

  “That day she died . . . she was planning to leave me.”

  “What? Dad what are you talking about? Mom took me up to Providence to look at RISD. We were on our way home when the accident happened.”

  He shook his head. “She told me before she left that she had to leave. She was going to tell you on the way home. I wondered for a while if she had. You were so hysterical in the hospital it was hard to tell. I waited to see if you would say anything. By the time I realized she hadn’t told you, I thought it was too late . . . that there was no point, it would just upset you . . . but I was being a coward. I was afraid that once you knew your mother had been leaving me that you would too.”

  “Oh, Dad.” I stroked his hand. “Even if it were true . . . even if Mom had been planning to leave, I wouldn’t have left. But why . . .” I stopped, recalling the fights they’d had about money in the weeks before that trip, how angry she’d been that he’d spent my college money on that Warhol, and then the turmoil caused by the insurance-fraud accusation after the Warhol had been stolen. My mother certainly had plenty of reasons to be angry with my father, but still I couldn’t imagine her ever leaving him. Then again, I’d never imagined that she was the descendant of an ancient line of supernatural guardians either.

  “Maybe she wanted to get you away from me,” my father said. “She was probably right. Look at the mess I’ve gotten us into now.”

  “We’ll be okay, Dad. The police have found a lead on the man whom they think might have been behind the burglary. They found a scrap of canvas from one of the Pissarros at his store last night. Everything will be all right.”

  I wanted to say something reassuring about my mother—that of course he knew her, his wife of forty years—but I f
ound I couldn’t. I was no longer sure I knew who she was. So instead we sat in silence, gazing at the face of the woman whom we both loved, but who had kept her secrets from both of us.

  I spent most of the day at the hospital, sitting with my father, or talking to his doctor. Dr. Monroe told me that Roman was healing well from his bullet wound, but that he was concerned about his blood pressure. He also said he wanted my father to have a psych evaluation before he left the hospital.

  “Because you think he shot himself.”

  “Because I know he shot himself,” he countered.

  “My father is not suicidal. He thought . . .” I floundered, aware that if I explained that my father thought that shooting himself was the only way to prevent the spirits inhabiting the burglars—the dybbuks—from getting inside him, the doctor would really think my father was crazy. And if let on that I thought my father might have been right, then my father wasn’t the only one who’d be getting a psych evaluation. “He was confused,” I finally said.

  “Then we need to consider the possibility of Alzheimer’s. Do I have your permission to do a brain scan?”

  I told him yes. I hoped it wouldn’t alarm my father, but in a way I thought that the hospital might be the best place for him right now.

  I brought dinner in from Sammy’s Noodle Shop for Roman, Zach, and myself, then I went home and took a short nap so that I’d be awake for my 1:00 a.m. meeting with Oberon. I wasn’t used to keeping such late hours.

  When I got to the Empire State Building, I was surprised to see that there was still a line for the Observatory. I had a feeling, though, that Oberon and I wouldn’t be waiting on it. At least I hoped we wouldn’t. Like most New Yorkers I had an aversion to tourist sites. I’d been up to the Observatory, but only because Becky had made me go on the day we graduated from high school “to mark the day with something really spectacular.” I’d thought it was a silly idea, but had gone along with her because she was impossible to thwart once she was set on something. And she’d been right—it was spectacular seeing the whole island of Manhattan stretched out below us.

  “It’s ours for the taking, James,” she’d said, leaning into the stiff wind. “We can do whatever we want with it from now on.”

  Becky had followed her own advice. She’d started a rock band instead of following her mother’s dreams for her of becoming a lawyer—and now it was paying off. The band was about to land a contract with a major record label. But what had I done in the eight years since we graduated high school? Yes, I’d started a jewelry company that was doing pretty well, but I hadn’t lived on my own or had a significant relationship with a man that had lasted longer than six months. The truth was that I’d been playing it safe since the car accident.

  I was startled out of my newest bout of self-pity by the appearance of Oberon striding down Fifth Avenue toward me. His long dreads were flying in the air behind him, his ankle-length coat rippling around him like a cloak. He looked every inch a king. A shimmering purple aura radiated around him. The people standing on line for the Observatory straightened up when it touched them, but they didn’t stare at him.

  “How do you do it?” I asked when he reached me. “How do you blend in?”

  “People see what they want to see. You’d be surprised how many pass through this world unseen. Most of us try to keep a low profile, but not the creature we’re visiting tonight.”

  “Creature?” I asked nervously as I followed Oberon into the lobby. I remembered that Fen and Puck had been alarmed about some of the guides I might have to seek out.

  Oberon laughed. “Don’t worry, this one’s fairly benign. I’m starting you out with the gentler of our kind.”

  We walked past the elevator banks for the office floors of the building. Each bank had a security turnstile. When we came to the last one—for the highest floors—he took out another of his Post-its, wrote something on it, and passed it through the sensor. The light turned green. After he had passed through, he handed me the note to swipe. I took a look at it, expecting some esoteric symbol, but found instead the words Open sesame! I laughed, and then, because he had gone on ahead of me and wasn’t looking, put the note in my pocket.

  My ears popped on the way up, but I was doing fine until the elevator doors opened on the one-hundredth floor onto a glass wall that faced all of lower Manhattan and upper New York Bay glittering under a clear night sky. I had the sensation that when I stepped off the elevator I would be floating above the city, and for a moment I was frozen. Oberon had to nudge me forward. I noticed then that a sound studio was sandwiched between the first wall of glass and the outside window. Stenciled in silver on the first wall of glass were the letters WROX.

  “I listen to this station all the time,” I said, stepping out of the elevator. “Especially the night show.” I focused on the lone figure in the studio, who was seated at an equipment board so complicated that it might have been the control panel of a 747. Wearing large bulbous headphones, the DJ looked as though she were, in fact, in the cockpit of an airplane. “Is that Ariel Earhart, the host of The Night Flight?”

  Oberon nodded. “I told her the handle was too conspicuous, but she won’t listen to me. She’s too in love with the sound of her own voice.” He paused with his hand on the door and glanced at the glowing red letters above the door that spelled out ON THE AIR. Ariel Earhart in her soundproof booth, her back to us, lifted up her right hand, middle finger extended. Oberon laughed.

  “Do you mean that she’s the same Ariel from Shakespeare’s Tempest?” I asked, but Oberon put a finger to his lips as he opened the door. As we stepped into the studio, we were surrounded by the smooth, melodious tones of a woman’s voice reading the poem she used each night to begin her show.

  Night is a creature, flitting bat or owl—

  mercurial in mood, from wind that howls

  to starsplit balm, to sizzle in July—

  and host to other sorts of wings that fly:

  the feathered loft of song, of spirit-flight

  invisible as thought, but pure delight.

  Come soar with me, winged travelers by night;

  The city far below twinkles goodbye

  and we’re moonward! As swift as hawks, we fly.

  “Good evening, New York, this is Ariel Earhart, welcoming you aboard The Night Flight. To start us out on our flight tonight here’s some new music from one of my favorite new bands, London Dispersion Force.”

  She pressed a button and the studio filled with Jay’s song about unrequited love. Fiona sang:

  I might as well attempt to scale a tower,

  a thousand miles in height, its walls slick stone,

  as try to win your heart which by the hour

  grows more distant, leaves me so alone.

  Was Becky right? I wondered. Was Jay really talking about me?

  “Yeah, ’fraid so,” the DJ said as she swiveled her chair around and took off her headphones. From her seductive voice I’d always pictured Ariel Earhart as a bombshell, but the woman in the chair barely looked like a woman. In skinny black jeans, Converse high-tops, and a long black T-shirt, she looked more like a teenaged boy. A Goth boy. Her pale blond hair stood up in spikes and she wore heavy chains around her neck, waist, and wrists. “You’re the girl in that song, Garet James,” she purred. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

  “Really?” I asked, unnerved that she knew so much about me. “I’ve been a fan of your show for years . . . but how do you know Jay’s singing about me? Do you know him?”

  “No,” she said, curling her feet underneath her and gesturing at the chair by her side for me to sit down in. “But I’ve been listening to London Dispersion Force for some time now.” She cocked her head to one side as if listening to something right now. “Yes, your friends have just been offered a contract with Vista Records. I just hope that the conflict between Jay and Becky doesn’t split up the band. You know how that goes.” She smiled and lifted her right hand, splaying open her finger
s. The heavy chains around her wrist clanked together like bells tolling.

  “Oh, I’m sure they’ll work it out,” I said, “but how—?” Before I could finish my question she had spun back to her control board and put her headphones back on.

  “That was ‘Troubadour’ by London Dispersion Force,” she whispered huskily into the mike. “Catch them tomorrow night at the Mercury Lounge. Now I have a special request from Obie Smith to all his friends in the city. There’s a storm a-brewin’, children, so keep your chins up and don’t give in to your darkest fears. Remember, it’s always darkest before the dawn.” She hit another switch and the room filled with the sound of rain and thunder, then the opening chords of “Riders on the Storm.”

  “Okay.” Ariel launched herself out of the spinning chair, all the chains she wore crashing like the thunder on the sound track. “I’ve got a twenty-minute set of storm music queued. That should give us enough time.”

  “It’s her first time, remember,” Oberon said, following Ariel out of the booth to the elevator.

  “All the better.” Ariel grinned at me and squeezed my arm. “The first time’s the best and we have a perfect night for it. The wind’s from the south and it’s clear as a bell.”

  “The first time doing what?” I asked, beginning to get nervous. I didn’t see why we had to leave the studio. “A perfect night for what?”

  “Here’s the elevator,” Ariel said instead of answering my questions. “The last visitors have left the Observatory.”

  I opened my mouth to point out that if the last visitors had left the Observatory, then surely that meant it was closed. Besides, I was pretty sure that you had to go back down to the lobby to go to the Observatory. But Oberon was already scrawling the number 86 within a circle on a Post-it and slapping it on the elevator wall beside the other buttons. The number and circle immediately glowed green just like all the other floor buttons. He pushed it and the elevator descended to the eighty-sixth floor where the doors opened onto the deserted Observatory.