Black Swan Rising

by Lee Carroll

  “But you didn’t, Jay! You got up and saved her.” I didn’t know how to explain to Jay what forces he’d been battling to stay awake. I was sure that the fog Becky had let in the apartment had both coaxed her into trying to take her own life and lulled Jay asleep. “And it’s not your fault she did this—”

  “My fault . . .” The voice came from the bed. Jay and I looked down and saw that Becky’s eyes were open. They looked huge in her white face. “I’m so sorry . . .”

  “It’s okay, Becky.” I sat down on the bed next to her and reached for her hand. Her fingers felt limp and cold. Looking down at those huge eyes in that pale face reminded me of Melusine as she had melted into the rock. I squeezed Becky’s hand as if I could keep her from slipping away by holding on to her tightly. “You didn’t know what you were doing.”

  Becky licked her dry, chapped lips. “But I did. I just thought it would be easier. . . . I felt tired of trying so hard. I mean, who am I kidding, trying to be a rock star? I should have gone to law school like my mother said . . . Oh, shit! Is my mother here? Does she know?”

  “She’s on her way up from Fort Lauderdale,” Jay said. “I’m sorry, Beck. I had to call her.”

  Tears slid down Becky’s face. I plucked a tissue from the box on the bedside table and dabbed at them. “This is going to kill her. What was I thinking?”

  “You weren’t thinking, sweetie. You were”—the words under a spell occurred to me, but I bit them back—“under too much pressure. You’ll get some rest . . . and some help . . . and you’ll get better. I promise.”

  Becky nodded, but her eyes were already drooping closed again. I sat by her, holding her hand, trying to think how I was going to make good on that promise.

  I stayed with Becky through most of the morning, taking turns with Jay watching her. When Jay relieved me, I went to see my father. I had a bad moment when I walked into his room and found it empty, but then a nurse came in and told me that my father and his friend had gone to the sunroom. I hurried down the hall and found Roman sitting up in his wheelchair playing bridge with Zach and two Chinese ladies whom he introduced as Minnie and Sue. His color looked good and he was smiling. After they finished their hand, I took Zach aside and told him about Becky.

  “Poor thing,” Zach said, shaking his head. “I know she’s been under a lot of pressure.”

  “Has she?” I asked, but then without waiting for an answer, went on, “I don’t know if we should tell Roman. I’m afraid it will remind him of when Santé killed himself.” As I said it, I realized that maybe I shouldn’t have told Zach. I’d always worried that he might be suicidal.

  But although he looked saddened by the news, Zach seemed remarkably calm. “I see what you mean,” he said. “It is similar. Santé killed himself just before his biggest show, and Becky’s band is right on the edge of making it really big.” He smiled ruefully. “Sometimes I think it’s easier to be a failure.”

  The remark startled me. All these years that Zach hadn’t painted, I’d thought he was lacking in inspiration. I’d never considered that he was protecting himself from heartache by not trying too hard.

  “You’re not a failure, Zach,” I said, putting my hand on his arm. “You’re . . . family. I don’t know what I would have done these last few days without you.”

  Zach’s eyes widened and gleamed. I was instantly afraid he might start weeping, but he squared his shoulders and pulled himself out of his characteristic slouch. “Don’t worry about Roman and Becky,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on both of them. You do whatever you have to do. I’ll hold down the fort here.”

  Despite Zach’s assurances I hated to leave Becky, but at eleven a nurse delivered a message to me from Oberon. Meet me at 2:00 on the steps in front of City Hall. Wear your welding clothes.

  My welding clothes? Then I remembered that the only elemental I’d yet to meet was fire. Will had said that Oberon was saving the fiercer guides for last. I couldn’t begin to imagine what would be more dangerous than jumping off the Empire State Building or traveling through the city’s water system in purely molecular form, but I did know that I’d be better prepared for whatever was in store for me if I got some sleep.

  What finally prompted me to get out was spotting Joe Kiernan. I was coming back from the cafeteria when I saw him heading into Becky’s room. I stopped in the hallway and waved Jay down when he came out immediately afterward.

  “What’s he doing here?” I asked. “Does he think what happened to Becky had something to do with the robbery?”

  Jay stared at me. “How could he?” Then he shrugged. “He came by earlier too. He said he just wanted to see, as a friend, how Becky was doing.”

  I didn’t trust Detective Kiernan to do anything casually, but I couldn’t imagine how he’d know that Becky’s suicide attempt was connected to John Dee—and I wasn’t about to try to explain it to him. “I think you’d better keep an eye on him,” I told Jay. “I have to go home for a while.”

  Jay nodded. “I think you’d better get some rest. You’re beginning to sound paranoid.”

  I went home and took a long hot shower (in the third-floor bathroom; I didn’t think I’d be using my dad’s bathroom for a while). I put on sweatpants and an old T-shirt and then, for no good reason, Will’s shirt over that. When I lay down, though, I heard Jay’s voice describing what had happened last night.

  Becky and I had watched The Red Shoes at a Film Forum festival when we were sixteen. She’d loved it so much that she’d dragged me back to see it a second time—and gone back by herself a third. I’d liked the movie too, but I’d thought at the time it was strange how obsessed with it she became. It was peculiar that it had come on last night when it wasn’t even on the TV schedule. Becky was really excited. . . . She even insisted that we TiVo it for you.

  I got out of bed and padded barefoot downstairs to the second floor. When I opened the door to my dad’s apartment, I was assailed by the coppery tang of blood. I almost shut the door and fled up the stairs, but I went to the couch instead and sat down facing the TV. There were two open bottles, two empty glasses, and a large bowl on the coffee table. I picked up one bottle of wine and read the label: Woop Woop, an Australian Shiraz that the liquor store on Hudson sold and Becky loved to buy because it was cheap and she loved saying the name. That would have been the bottle she brought. I picked up the other bottle, the one Jay said they’d found in my dad’s cupboard. The bottle was so covered in dust that I had to wipe off the label to read it. Le Vin du Temps Perdu. The wine of lost time. I was pretty sure that it wasn’t a bottle my father had bought, but how had Dee managed to sneak it into the house? Had the shadowmen left it the night of the burglary? I lifted the bottle and noticed a little was still left. I poured a few inches of deep red liquid into one of the empty glasses and held it up to my nose. A heady aroma of chocolate and cinnamon wafted up from the glass. Before I could remind myself why it was not a good idea, I took a sip.

  The wine was so dry that it seemed to evaporate as soon as it hit my tongue and turn into a mist that filled my mouth . . . a mist that tasted of chocolate and lavender and some unnamable spice. I took another sip and tried to roll the flavor on my tongue before it evaporated. I closed my eyes and I was standing in a vineyard in southern France. I could feel the sun on my skin and smell lavender in the air . . .

  I snapped my eyes open and pushed the wineglass away. Le Vin du Temps Perdu, indeed! Talk about the dangers of drink! And Becky had drunk a whole bottle of this . . . while watching a movie that shouldn’t have been on.

  I looked around for the remote and then dug in the couch cushions until I found it. I switched on the TV and pressed the button for the DVR menu. The most recent recording was Bringing Up Baby with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, but it was the only recording made last night so I selected it and hit PLAY. I fast-forwarded through a commercial for a Turner Classic Movies DVD collection until I saw Robert Osborne, TCM’s movie critic, standing in front of his brick fireplace
in his clubby den full of oil paintings and overstuffed red chairs. Becky and Jay would have watched the intro—Jay loved Robert Osborne and could do a pitch-perfect imitation of his glib movie intros. I hit PLAY.

  “Hi, I’m Robert Osborne and our movie tonight is”—the screen flickered for half a second and Robert Osborne’s broad, friendly face froze. His hooded eyes (You can tell he’s spent his life in dark movie theaters, Jay always said) seemed to darken—“our movie for tonight is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes with the incomparable Moira Shearer as the doomed ballerina, Victoria Page, and the devastatingly charming Anton Walbrook as the diabolical impresario Boris Lermontov.”

  I leaned closer to the set. Something was wrong with the sound quality. Robert Osborne’s words didn’t quite match the movements of his mouth. Or maybe I was just tired. I pulled an old afghan throw over my knees and slid down in the couch, lulled by Robert Osborne’s mellifluous voice as he explained that the movie’s producers had wanted to create a manifesto for the power of art. He described with relish how the diabolical (he used the word several times) Lermontov drove Vicky Page to suicide.

  Funny, I thought, Robert Osborne didn’t usually give out spoilers like that. But it was okay since I had seen the film before. I hadn’t remembered, though, how hallucinatory and vivid were the dream sequences in which Vicky Page reenacted the story of the girl who puts on a pair of red shoes crafted by a mysterious shoemaker and then dances herself to death. It was downright psychedelic . . . and Freudian. The face of the shoemaker became the face of her lover and then the face of Lermontov. I hadn’t noticed before how much Lermontov looked like John Dee . . . but of course I hadn’t met John Dee when I first saw the movie.

  I could see how the movie must have affected Becky. In her own way, Becky was as driven to succeed as the ballerina Vicky Page. She even looked like Moira Shearer with her abundant red curls. And it suddenly struck me that the actor who played the composer who falls in love with Vicky looked a lot like Jay.

  I must have fallen asleep for a bit because the next thing I knew I was sitting up, wineglass in hand, watching the penultimate scene in which Lermontov tells Vicky she must choose between the life of a great dancer and the mundane life of a housewife. I dimly remembered arguing with Becky about this scene when we first saw the film.

  “Why does Vicky have to choose?” I’d asked.

  “Because she does!” Becky had answered. “No one gets to have it both ways.”

  Now I saw Lermontov’s—and Becky’s—point. Most of the great artists were no good at love—unless they had relationships with people who subjugated their own desires and goals to theirs. People who tried to lead ordinary lives—like Zach and Jay and me—failed in their art. In truth, we failed at everything. I’d been so busy running around trying to save the world that I’d ignored the signs that my best friend was in trouble. Now she was in the hospital along with my father. How many of the people I loved would have to suffer because of my carelessness? I really wasn’t any good at art or life, I thought as I watched Vicky Page run from the theater and throw herself in front of the Paris-bound train. I could see why she did it; it was just too hard to choose. At least now she could take off those red shoes and rest.

  I picked up the remote to turn off the set, but Robert Osborne came back on. He was sitting in his red chair in front of a crackling fire with a glass of red wine in his hand.

  “The Red Shoes was a failure when it was released in 1948,” he said. “Many moviegoers couldn’t stomach the film’s final message—that it’s better to die for art than to live for nothing. But we know what the right choice is, don’t we?” Robert Osborne smiled—even the woman in the portrait above the fireplace seemed to smile—and I nodded in agreement. I was sitting on the edge of the couch now, so close to the TV set that I could see the amber glint in Robert Osborne’s eyes. He was looking right at me, waiting for me to do the right thing. It was the right thing. After all, Robert Osborne knew everything. It occurred to me that Robert Osborne had been sent to me as a spirit guide. This was an unfamiliar, and vaguely uncomfortable, sensation, but totally compelling. I needed to follow Robert Osborne.

  I got up and walked into the bathroom. The razor that Becky had used was still on the rim of the sink. As I picked it up, I met my eyes in the mirror. My pupils had swollen to cover all of my irises, making my eyes look black and empty, a cold emptiness that rose up inside me like water filling up a dark well. I would drown in that emptiness if I didn’t do something soon.

  I looked down and saw that my left hand was holding the razor blade over my right wrist. Funny, I thought, as I dragged the blade tentatively across my skin, I’m right-handed. A faint crimson line opened up in my skin. Letting out the dark. I could hear the surge of my blood, hammering against my skin as if eager to get out. But the sound came from the bathtub. It was the shower curtain rings rattling against the rod. Jay had said something about the shower curtain . . . the sound of the curtain moving in the breeze had woken him up . . . only the window wasn’t open now. I had closed it when I first came into the bathroom this morning. I stared at the curtain, the hand that held the razor blade arrested above my wrist, puzzled. Later I would wonder why it was this discrepancy that got to me—not the appearance of a bottle of wine called Lost Time or the new décor on the TCM set or the oddity of Robert Osborne suggesting suicide—but a shower curtain moving in a windless room. I’m still not sure why, but something in its wrongness penetrated the black fog that had swamped my brain.

  I put the razor blade down on the edge of the sink, stepped over to the tub, and looked down. There, sprawled on the bottom of the tub was a perfect miniature version of Vicky Page in the last scene of The Red Shoes—from wild red hair to tattered, stained tutu and red shoes. I bent down to look closer and recognized Lol. She lay limply on the bottom of the porcelain tub, one tiny hand jerking the edge of the shower curtain. When she saw me she opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Then she let go of the shower curtain and pointed at her feet.

  What I had thought were red shoes were actually Lol’s bare feet stained red with blood.

  The smaller fey can’t stand the touch of iron. I recalled what Oberon had said in the park when he scattered the remains of the sylphs. And blood was full of iron.

  I quickly scooped her up and carried her to the sink. I rinsed her feet in cold water, then filled the sink with water so she could soak her feet in it. While she sat on the edge of the sink, I found a Band-Aid in the medicine cabinet and put it on over my scratched wrist. When I looked back down into the basin, I saw images forming in the water, just as I had in the park with Melusine. So she had left me with one skill, only instead of seeing the present, I saw the past in the water: Lol finding Becky in the bathroom and trying to stanch the blood, but when the blood had got on her feet, she had fallen in the tub. She’d rattled the shower curtain to alert Jay.

  “Thank you,” I said. “You saved Becky—and me.” She squawked and splashed water in my face. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  Lol folded her arms over her chest and huffed. Then she flexed her wings and flew into the living room and hovered above the TV set. The image of Robert Osborne was still frozen on the screen, only it wasn’t Robert Osborne. It was John Dee.

  “He tried to make Becky kill herself and then he did the same thing to me.”

  Lol fluttered in the air and pointed at something on the screen.

  “Yes,” I said. “I see. It’s John Dee’s lair. The paintings and the rugs are the same as the ones I saw in the cavern under the river. I’ll tell Oberon—damn!” I looked at the time on the cable box. It was 1:33. I had less than half an hour to make it down to City Hall. “I have to go meet the fire elemental,” I told Lol, and then, remembering that she was a fire fey, added, “Do you want to come with me?”

  Lol’s tawny skin turned powder white. She shook her head, for once rendered mute. She had dive-bombed a vampire and risked the contagion of poisonou
s blood. I wondered what could possibly scare her so badly.

  The Exchequer

  Riding the subway to City Hall, I couldn’t quite shake the dirty feel of Dee’s presence in my brain. If the shadowmen’s breaking into my home felt like a violation, this felt like mind rape. The worst part was wondering if he was still inside me, subtly influencing my thoughts in ways I couldn’t imagine. When I looked at my fellow passengers on the subway, I sensed fatigue and despair, but was I projecting my own bad mood on them? Were the murky auras I saw hallucinations? Were the voices I’d heard since my flight with Ariel my own demons speaking to me? Was I imagining everything?

  Perhaps you’re simply losing your mind, a voice that sounded somewhere between John Dee’s and Robert Osborne’s said inside my head. I’d taken each spectacular manifestation I’d experienced as proof that what was happening was real, but what if it was all a hallucination? How could I possibly know?

  I got off at Park Place. As I was leaving the subway station, I passed several mosaic eyes embedded in the walls. I’d seen them before, but today I glanced at them nervously, as if they were following my progress. I couldn’t quite shake that feeling of being watched as I walked east on Park Place. Even seeing Oberon waiting for me—in a beige sweatshirt and baseball cap—at the security checkpoint on Broadway did nothing to reassure me of my sanity. He could simply be part of the whole elaborate hallucination. I greeted him politely, though, just in case.

  “I’m sorry about your friend Becky,” he said. “I knew Dee might try to get to you through one of your loved ones, but I thought it would be your father, whom I’m watching much of the time at the hospital, or Jay, whom I told Lol to watch.”

  “Becky would have died if not for Lol.” I told him how I’d found Lol in the bathtub with her feet soaked in blood. I didn’t tell him, though, about my own close call with the razor blade; my long sleeves covered the Band-Aid. I saw him studying me closely so I quickly went on to give a full report of everything that had happened yesterday with Melusine. A shadow of pain crossed his face when I told him about Melusine melting into the rock, and he had no idea what could be done to bring her back from her current state inside the bottle. The only question he asked me was about John Dee’s lair.