Black Swan Rising

by Lee Carroll

  As we walked through the darkened gift shop, past models of the Empire State Building and postcards of the panoramic views, Ariel began removing the chains from her neck and wrists and draping them over the counters. When we reached the door that led to the outside deck, Oberon turned to me. “I believe you have the key.”

  “Oh.” I guiltily extracted the Open sesame Post-it from my pocket and affixed it to the door, which immediately swung open. “Here,” I said, offering him the note back. “I’m sorry I took it before.”

  “Not at all,” he replied, holding his hands up. “I’m glad you’re thinking ahead. You keep it. You’re going to need all the help you can get.”

  I put the note back in my pocket as I stepped out onto the open deck, just in time before the wind would have whipped it out of my hands. It had been windy when I came here with Becky, but nothing like this. Nor had the view in the daytime appeared so dizzying. The lights spread out below us were like a second night sky—a galaxy of its own whirling in inner space.

  “Um . . . maybe it’s not such a good idea to be out here in this high a wind,” I shouted over the shrieking gusts.

  “Nonsense, the wind’s perfect.” Ariel didn’t have to raise her voice over the wind to be heard. In fact, the wind seemed to pick up her voice and bring it directly into my ears. “Since it’s from the south, I suggest we start on the north side.”

  “Start what?” I shouted back at her.

  “You’ll see soon enough.”

  We walked around the deck until we reached the north side. The buildings of midtown stood like a range of cliffs hewn out of light. Ariel moved to the edge of the deck and wrapped her hands around the steel barrier. The wind parted the back of her hair, exposing the nape of her neck and revealing a small tattoo in the shape of two outspread wings. Oberon came to stand beside her, his long dreadlocks whipping around his face like live snakes.

  “Can you hear it?” she asked, her voice dancing into my ears on the blasting wind.

  “Hear what?”

  “Close your eyes,” she commanded, taking my hand. “And listen.”

  I closed my eyes and listened to the wind as it gathered, swelled, rushed . . . then slackened. Gathered, swelled, rushed . . . then slackened. Slowly I began to hear a voice in it, a voice neither male nor female, young nor old, loud nor soft. It crooned and keened, shouted and whispered. It sang a song as old as time, but always rising toward something new. It plucked at the hairs along my arms, bellowed my lungs, thumped the muscle of my heart, and whistled through my veins. It blew right through me as if I were its instrument. I opened my eyes and saw the city below me. It was all its instrument—the skyscrapers were the keys and the long avenues were the pipes of one great organ that the wind played. The wind blew through the city and each and every person in it, connecting every molecule to every other. I felt a great swell of emotion—whether fear or delight I couldn’t have said—that seemed to lift me on the back of that singing multitude. It did lift me up, right above the curved bars of the steel railing and then out over the city. As I passed the top of the railing, I grabbed at it with my right hand, but Ariel grabbed and squeezed my other hand and clucked her tongue.

  It’s got you now, Ariel’s voice came from inside my head. My voice is in the wind and now the wind is inside you. Don’t worry. Just let it carry you and keep listening. As long as you can hear its song, you can’t fall . . . and if you fall, I’m here to catch you.

  I stole a quick glance over to Ariel, but there was nothing there but air. The panic at being alone rang in my ears so loudly I couldn’t hear the wind’s song anymore. Immediately, I began to drop, but a hand tugged me back up.

  Never a good idea to fly visible, Ariel’s voice trilled in my head. We’d scare the living daylights out of the stargazers.

  I placed my right hand in front of my face, but I saw right through it to the lights of Fifth Avenue streaming below me. Ariel and I—we’d left Oberon behind—were moving north fast, buoyed on the wind’s back. Braided into the wind’s song I began to hear other voices—the murmurs of couples riding home in taxicabs, the farewells of drunkards leaving closing bars, the sighs of sleepers in high-rise apartment buildings. We passed the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the green mansard roof of the Plaza Hotel, and then Central Park stretched out in front of us. Something about the park was strange, though. Although the night was dry and clear, there was a low fog coating the ground.

  Hang on, Ariel’s voice commanded.

  I thought that’s what I’d been doing, but then I felt a tug at my hand and we began to swoop down fast toward the treetops. I recognized the Wollman Skating Rink, deserted at this hour, and the Great Lawn, both slick with a coating of gray fog, like a scum of old milk on top of cold coffee. At first I thought it was deserted too, but then I began to make out faint, multicolored lights amid the trees.

  “Light sylphs?”

  “Yes,” Ariel answered out loud. Her voice sounded graver than before. “They’re moving much slower than they should be, though. I just want to have a look—”

  We plunged so quickly my ears popped. Then we flew through the trees, dodging the bare branches. What color would the light sylphs have to drink here? I wondered. Only a few dull brown leaves clung to the elms that lined the Promenade.

  “They should have moved indoors by now,” Ariel answered my unvoiced question. “This clutch usually moves inside to the rain-forest exhibit at the zoo or sometimes the butterfly dome at the Museum of Natural History . . .” Ariel’s voice faded as we hovered above a bare tree branch. Something was draped over it, a scrap of trash that had been blown there by the wind . . . but then when we moved closer, I saw that it was actually one of the light sylphs, only all the color had been drained from its body. It lay gray and motionless against the rough bark. Its wings, stirring in the wind, made a sound like crumpled cellophane.

  “What happened to it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know . . . here’s another one.” We flew from tree to tree, finding one after another of the drained and crumpled creatures. Worse, some had fallen to the ground where they were wind-tossed to and fro along with the empty plastic bags, food wrappers, and cigarette butts. These sylphs were already disintegrating, turning into a chalky gray dust that sifted into the gray fog that lay over everything.

  “What killed them?” I asked.

  Ariel didn’t answer aloud, but I heard the answer inside her head: The fog. They drank the fog and died. Aloud she said, “We’d better get back and tell Oberon.”

  We flew back into the wind. It was harder going this way and didn’t leave any energy for speaking, out loud or not. The exultation I’d felt on the journey out was gone now. When I listened to the song of the wind, I only heard a low keening, like someone, somewhere, weeping.

  The Train to Tarascon

  As soon as we touched down on the Empire State Building, Ariel told Oberon about the massacre of the sylphs.

  “It was the fog,” she said.

  “Yes, Despair and Discord have made their entrance into New York City now,” Oberon said in a booming voice. “Garet and I both witnessed their fog along the Hudson from my window. And yet there’s no fog on the bay or rivers tonight. So I assume they have transformed themselves into some other entity.” Oberon waved his hand at the sparkling clean vista of city that lay below us. We were on the south side of the observation deck now and could see both the East and Hudson Rivers and as far south as Upper New York Bay and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. There was no trace of the fog that we’d seen downtown at the end of Jane Street. “Somehow Dee must have sent a sliver of fog to the park.” Oberon concluded. “But I don’t know how he’s moving it.”

  “Maybe he’s hiding somewhere in the park,” Ariel suggested.

  Oberon shook his head. “Not necessarily. Clearly he’s able to move it from place to place. We have to figure out how and trace it back to where he is.”

  “Maybe someone in Central Park saw where it came
from tonight,” Ariel suggested.

  “But it killed all those sylphs,” I pointed out, shuddering at the memory of the tiny drained and desiccated corpses. “Would anyone survive the fog to tell?”

  Oberon and Ariel exchanged a look, then Oberon nodded. “We’ll go see her tomorrow. It wasn’t going to be her next lesson, but there’s no point putting it off.”

  “My next lesson?” I asked. “You mean flying and superpower hearing aren’t enough?” It was meant as a joke, but from the worried glance that Oberon and Ariel exchanged I suspected they were wondering if anything was going to be enough.

  Oberon hailed me a cab on Fifth Avenue. Before I got into the cab he handed me a Post-it note with a Midtown address written on it and told me he would meet me there at noon. “Get some sleep,” he advised as he closed the door behind me. “Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”

  I couldn’t imagine how it could be any longer than the one I’d just lived through—or how I could possibly absorb any more abilities than I already had. As the cab hurtled down the deserted avenue, I was bombarded by the voices around me. The cab driver was worried about saving enough money to send for his wife and three children from Mumbai. The man in the Ford Explorer at the light worried that he wouldn’t get home to his house in Englewood before his wife woke up and began to suspect it wasn’t his job that was keeping him late in the city . . . in fact, he’d lost his job three weeks ago, but hadn’t had the nerve to tell her . . . or his mistress.

  We were stopped at the light for less than a minute, but it was long enough to become entangled in this man’s whole life. At least from the sky the voices had been too diffuse to get wrapped up in. They were louder at street level. Just passing the couple walking arm in arm on Fourteenth Street I learned that she was terrified that he didn’t love her and he was even more afraid that he did. The late-night crowd in the Meatpacking District deluged me with fear and anxiety, lust and insecurity. Were people always this frightened, I wondered, or was this Dee’s doing? And how could I possibly think straight to find him when I was swamped by voices on a 3:00 a.m. cab ride? What would it feel like to walk through midtown at noon?

  I was so immersed in the voices in my head that I didn’t notice that we’d arrived at the town house.

  “Here we are, miss,” the taxi driver said aloud. Whore, he added in his head. I was so startled I almost dropped the bills I was passing him through the slot in the Plexiglas barrier. I saw in his head an image of Oberon—a large black man in a long black leather coat—handing me into a cab at 3:00 a.m. I wanted to spit back a retort—That’s not a pimp, you asshole, that’s the King of Shadows!—but I didn’t think that would help my case. Instead I took back one of the dollars I was going to include in the tip and got out without wishing him a good-night. I tried not to listen to the epithets he mentally hurled at me as I walked up the steps to my front door.

  I unlocked the door, praying for quiet, but when I stepped inside and punched in the alarm bypass code, I heard the strains of guitar music drifting down the stairs. Jay and Becky were still awake, then. As I climbed the stairs, I wondered what it would feel like to be with my friends. Would I hear their thoughts? Would I find out more than I wanted to know from the inside of their heads?

  I paused outside the partly ajar door to my father’s apartment and listened to Jay singing along with his guitar. He was playing the song I’d just heard on the radio, but somehow it sounded even sadder in his voice instead of Fiona’s and without the band backing it up.

  I might as well attempt to fly the sky,

  to be a fish who dives ten thousand feet,

  as try to win your love. Why lie?—

  there’s no recovery from love’s defeat.

  I felt tears stinging my eyes as I listened, but I also felt drawn toward the song. It had the same mournful pull as the wind’s song. I pushed the door open as quietly as I could and padded cautiously into my father’s living room. Jay was sitting alone on the couch, in T-shirt and jeans, his long, curly hair matted against his forehead and neck from the exertion of playing earlier tonight. His eyes were closed as he sang the chorus:

  The troubadours wrote songs to salve heartbreak,

  to let their loves know all their endless pain,

  but words can’t bridge our gulf, my long heartache:

  I’ll just keep walking in the pouring rain.

  As he sang, I saw pictures . . . images inside his head. Images of me. Becky had been right. Jay was head over heels, totally in love with me. The thing that really touched me was that the images he had of me in his head were of some of the happiest moments of my life . . . stupid little moments that I’d almost forgotten about, such as ditching school and riding the subway out to Brighton Beach just to walk on the boardwalk and make up long, complicated histories for the Russian couples who sat on folding chairs warming their faces in the wan winter sunlight, afternoons combing vintage-record stores looking for rare jazz recordings and then running an extension cord out onto the roof so we could listen to them there on summer nights, watching Monty Python reruns late at night and me laughing so hard at the Spanish Inquisition skit that I snorted milk up my nose. Jay cherished a memory of me snorting milk up my nose. Shit.

  I must have made a noise because Jay opened his eyes. For a moment he didn’t look surprised to see me standing there, but then his eyes widened and he dropped his guitar pick. “Oh,” he said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “I didn’t want you to stop,” I said, sitting on the opposite end of the couch. “Um, is Becky—”

  “She went back to Williamsburg with Fiona.”

  “You know you don’t have to stay. They’ve caught the burglars.”

  “I can go if you want me to.”

  “No! I didn’t mean it that way, Jay. You’re always welcome to stay. You’re my best friend—” I didn’t have to have psychic abilities to see him wince at the word friend. “Jay—”

  He interrupted me, which was a mercy because I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to him next. “Um, actually, Garet, I have a favor to ask you.”

  “Yes?” I asked, bracing myself for a profession of undying love.

  “Uh, can I crash here a little longer? I mean, even after your dad comes back? I can sleep on the couch and I can keep an eye on him. Make him soup and stuff.”

  “Of course, Jay, you can stay here as long as you want . . . but why—?”

  I knew the answer before he said it. I saw the whole scene in his head, the fight with Becky and Fiona and the record producer after the show tonight. Becky calling Jay a hangover from the sixties, Fiona telling him to grow up. The condescending smile of the record producer as he told Jay, “Go home and mull it over, man. You’ll see the light in the morning.” The peal of laughter Jay heard coming from their table as he left the club.

  “I think I’m leaving the band,” Jay said, strumming a chord on the guitar. “Who knew I’d be the Stuart Sutcliffe of the group, huh?”

  I winced at the reference to the “Fifth Beatle,” who’d died of a brain hemorrhage shortly after leaving the group. “Oh, Jay,” I said, patting his arm, “it’s a bad time right now. People are . . . tense. Maybe you should give it some time.”

  “Yeah, well. Time I’ve got plenty of.” He gave me a brave smile, made all the more heartrending by the words I could hear inside his head: That’s all I’ve got.

  I was exhausted when I got back to my studio, but I knew right away that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep. When I closed my eyes, I saw the limp, drained bodies of the light sylphs—or Jay’s face, similarly drained of happiness. I sat down at my worktable and idly considered casting some molds for medallions. I had orders that were overdue. But then I recalled what had happened the last time I handled a welding torch when I was overtired. So I leaned back in my chair and stared out the window, then leaned back farther and stared out the skylight. The plywood board Becky had nailed up had come loose. Fixing it was something I could do. I couldn�
��t hurt myself too badly with a hammer, could I?

  I scrambled up on top of the table and reached for the board, but my fingers barely scraped it. Somehow Becky—a good seven inches shorter than me—had got up here. She must have done what the burglars had—and what we’d done back in high school when we wanted to go up on the roof—climbed up the metal bookshelf. As I stepped on a shelf, I wondered if I was heavier than I’d been in high school and whether the shelf would hold my weight, but then it had held the burglars’ weight. Besides, I’d just flown over Manhattan. What did I have to be afraid of?

  I found a hammer on the top shelf that Becky must have used and turned it around to use the claw to pull out the nails from the plywood board. They clinked, one by one, onto the metal table below me. When the board came loose, I lowered it onto the top shelf. A gust of cold air came pouring through the broken skylight. Above me I could see a clear sky studded with stars. Had they ever looked this bright over the city before—or was it my enhanced sight that made them look like a million diamonds against a velvet cloak?

  All thought of fixing the skylight gone, I climbed up the rest of the shelves and pulled myself through the skylight and out onto the roof—thankfully Becky had cleared the broken glass away. I hadn’t been up here since those summer nights that Jay and I had listened to jazz records while drinking bourbon purloined from Roman’s liquor cabinet. I’d forgotten how good the view was and how liberating it felt to stand among the city buildings with their water towers and hidden rooftop gardens. The rooftop world of the city, like the underground world of pipes and tunnels that lay beneath the city, had always struck me as a secret world. I’d had no idea how right I’d been! Fairies and goblins held court beneath the streets, and sprites and sylphs soared above them.