Black Swan Rising

by Lee Carroll

  Miraculously, only fourteen people (including five firefighters) had been killed in the more than one hundred separate fires set, but property damage was in the billions and more than two thousand people had been left homeless. An additional nine fatalities, with twenty-four people seriously injured, had occurred in the massive traffic accident on the West Side Highway that same night, the largest single car accident in New York City history.

  Wow, I couldn’t help thinking; I had to stop reading for a moment, with a shudder. If we hadn’t gotten to Dee . . . would anyone have survived?

  Becky came, long sleeves covering the bandages on her wrists. “I’d slap you if you were up to it, James,” she said, plopping herself down on the side of my bed. “What were you thinking of wandering around a New York City park at night? On Arson Night of all nights! You could have gotten yourself killed. And your poor hand!” She cradled my bandaged right hand in hers. “You won’t be able to weld for months!”

  I had second-degree burns on my right hand and double pneumonia from lying out in the cold all night.

  “Joe—Detective Kiernan says he thinks you were following some lead on the gallery robbery. Was that it?”

  I nodded and pretended to be too weak to say more, but the next time Detective Kiernan came to visit (he came almost every day even though my father was no longer a suspect in the robbery), I told him I had spotted Dee on the subway and followed him uptown and into the park and then been ambushed by his hired thugs. The story sounded pretty silly even to me, but it was more plausible than the truth, and Kiernan only shook his head sadly and told me to stop playing detective. I promised him I would.

  Although I had no lack of visitors—Jay and Zach came frequently, too—the one person I wanted to see the most never came. I knew it was foolish to hope that Will would regret taking the box and come back, but every evening, as soon as the light faded from the sky through my west-facing window, I waited. I insisted that the night nurse leave my window open a crack, even though she said the cold air wasn’t good for my recovering lungs. Sometimes too, I would take out the lover’s eye (which had been in my jeans pocket) and try to look through it, hoping for at least a glimpse of Will from Madame Dufay’s memory, but when I placed it to my eye, all I saw was the silver backing of the brooch. Perhaps Oberon had destroyed the portrait—or perhaps smoke had destroyed the eye’s ability to see.

  And maybe Will was wary of visiting me in the hospital—as were Lol and Fen and the other fey and elementals I had met (I had asked for RN O. Smith, but drew only blank stares from the staff). I wanted to get home and look for them to see if any of them knew where Oberon and Will might have gone, but it was mid-January before I was released from the hospital. When I got back to the town house, I checked the DVR and found that the only movie recorded on it was Bringing Up Baby. I watched Robert Osborne do the introduction from his usual clubby-looking set, in his usual congenial manner. I couldn’t detect any sign of recent demonic possession.

  The next day I managed to slip out of the house while my father was in the gallery, and walked over to the hotel on the corner of Jane Street and the West Side Highway where Oberon lived. I found the façade covered with scaffolding, a large sign proclaiming that it was the future site of The Jane, a tony boutique hotel from the looks of the picture on the sign. I went inside and asked the clerk behind the refurbished desk (no longer protected by bulletproof Plexiglas) if any of the former SRO residents still lived in the hotel, and he told me that yes, some did, but when I asked about the tower room he told me that it was being turned into a bar.

  “What about the man who lived there?” I asked.

  The clerk shrugged and told me he’d only been working there since the first of the year.

  I went to Puck’s afterward and found that it had become a Starbucks.

  I took the subway to City Hall and snuck into the basement, but Ignatius T. Ashburn III’s office had gone back to being a janitor’s closet.

  I went to the National Jewelers Exchange and found that Noam Erdmann’s stall was manned by a Hasid named Saul Levy, who told me that the previous tenant had retired to Miami.

  As to Lol, I had no idea where she lived—if she lived anywhere—so there seemed no point in trying to search for her. I was still immensely grateful for her assistance with the second transmigration (and would never forget the sight of her upside-down face at the top of the window in Will’s Rolls just in the nick of time), so out of that gratitude and some sense of obligation, I did stare on more than one occasion into a wind in which I’d heard some rustling, but the source of that was inevitably dried brown leaves, or the morning’s newspapers, or discarded candy wrappers, or my imagination. If I ever crossed paths with Lol again, it would be her decision, not mine.

  By the time I got back to the town house I was exhausted. I expected to find my father fretting over where I had been, but instead I found him glued to the TV set. “I just heard that a plane’s gone down in the Hudson,” he told me.

  I had a sinking feeling as I sat down beside him. I might have got the box away from Dee, but the world was still a perilous place where planes crashed and people died. But when the CNN broadcaster came on, we learned that the airplane had, amazingly, landed safely on the Hudson near West Forty-second Street, navigated by a resolute and calm former fighter pilot named Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. My father and I watched the coverage for hours, listening to the testimony of witnesses who’d watched the plane’s miraculous water landing, and those on the ferries and tugboats that immediately came to the rescue of the stranded crew and passengers. As we watched, I kept imagining what the story could have been—how many people could have died if the plane had, instead of landing safely, crashed into a Manhattan high-rise.

  “It makes you feel hopeful,” my father said, wiping away a tear.

  “Yeah,” I answered, my own voice husky, “it does.” What I couldn’t tell my father was that it gave me hope that what I had experienced meant something. It had gradually dawned on me while watching the coverage that the stretch of river where the plane had landed was exactly where I had observed a cylinder of fog suggesting a plane during our ride uptown on Arson Night. It chilled me to think of it. As far as I knew, there hadn’t been any aerial catastrophes on Arson Night, so that roll of malevolent fog had likely never reached its critical mass. And it went to oblivion with the annihilation of Despair and Discord, but now it sounded like something even better than annihilation could have happened. As if the positive forces out there, the same ones that allowed us to transport our atoms to so much more quickly confront Dee, had protected that part of the river after its possession and made it a refuge. Which the plane had found.

  And if the world was in this way and many others a better place now, wasn’t it because I had gotten the box away from Dee? It was difficult to tell much from the news, though. The economy still looked bad, with home prices falling, car companies faltering, and unemployment claims reaching new weekly peaks, but there also did seem to be a mood of cautious optimism. Five days after Captain Sullenberger’s landing on the Hudson, I sat on the couch between Jay and Becky watching Barack Obama being sworn in as the forty-fourth president and felt myself tearing up when he said, “On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.”

  There were more private, personal signs of hope as well. Becky was happier than I’d seen her in months—mostly due to the influence of Joe Kiernan. He’d visited her every day in the hospital and then, when she was let out, gone to every show London Dispersion Force played. At first Becky had scoffed at the idea of dating a cop, but Joe endeared himself to her by constantly expressing his delight that she was not a lawyer. He endeared himself to Jay by agreeing that the big commercial record contract was a mistake and what they should really do was start their own indy recording label. He had a cousin in Brooklyn who had the equipment and space. I couldn’t begrudge Becky her happiness with Joe, even as the weeks passed
without any sign from Will.

  And, perhaps inspired by Becky’s hopeful example, I woke up one ice-blue morning with the warm inspiration that perhaps Will was skittish about contacting me exclusively because of how angry I might be about his theft, and that it was time for me to reach out. He could simply be too embarrassed to get in touch. With that in mind I contemplated paying a surprise visit to him one evening, but his silence had produced enough hurt—and caution—that I hit instead on the compromise of sending him a brief note. I selected a blank card with care at Barnes & Noble—the cover showed a young couple holding hands on the observation deck of the Empire State Building in the 1940s—and wrote that I had enjoyed our adventures together and I missed him. One sentence, no mention of the box. After further debate, I chose Warm thoughts, Garet over Love, Garet as my sign-off, mailed it to his apartment, and got it back a week later stamped ADDRESSEE MOVED—NO FORWARDING ADDRESS.

  That was a pretty bad jolt—I cried all the next day—but then I realized Black Swan Partners might have been harder to shut down than his apartment was to vacate. I wasn’t quite up to calling the office, but I did call Chuck Chennery and get a list of hedge fund websites where I might be able to get additional contact information for Will’s fund by pretending to be an investor. The first site I went to, Hedge World, reported Black Swan as having closed on the last day of the year, with a PO box in the Cayman Islands as an address for any partner needing further information. I mailed the old note in a new envelope, with low expectations this time that were fulfilled, although it did come back faster with its ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN stamp even though it had traveled thousands of miles as opposed to eight miles along Manhattan Island.

  In a final act of semidesperation, I called Hedge World’s offices, hoping that by some wild chance I would speak to someone who knew Will or Black Swan and might just be in a mood to talk. The HW phone receptionist, a very young-sounding woman, was pleasant enough but told me, “Will Hughes was a famously reclusive manager when he was running a fund. Someone here once tried to set up an investor with him and he’d only meet with him between two and three in the morning. Not much chance of finding him now that he’s closed his fund, I’m afraid.”

  So I finally had to give up on finding Will. Like Lol, I’d hear from him at a time of his own choosing—if ever.

  In the last week of February my father brought me to Zach Reese’s studio. “He’s been painting nonstop since mid-December,” Roman told me in an uncharacteristically vague and halting manner, as if he wasn’t quite sure how to describe what he had seen. “What he’s doing is . . . different . . . more controlled than his early work, but also more lucid . . . and luminous . . . Well, you’ll see. I want you to tell me what you think . . . whether I’m biased.”

  Zach Reese had lived and worked in a loft on Mercer Street since the late seventies—one of the first lofts in the area converted from warehouse space into studio and living space. I remembered visiting with my father when I was little and being scared by the giant hook that hung on the first floor and the rattling metal steps that led up to the studio, but once in the studio it was like being at the circus or in a tropical garden. There were huge canvases splashed with color, cans of paint lined up like vats of ice cream, and everywhere—on the walls, the floors, the canvas drop cloths—multicolored paint splatters like confetti after a parade. Over the years the paintings had vanished, the cans of paint were closed and stacked against the walls, the drop cloths tossed away. Only the splatters on the floors and walls remained, mute testimony to the creative spirit that had once dwelled in this space, but as they faded with age, they began to look like blood splatter from some horrible slaughter. The smell of turpentine had also faded, replaced by the medicinal reek of vodka.

  But when I walked up those stairs with my father on a cold, sunny day in February, I smelled turpentine and paint again. Zach greeted us at the door, a paintbrush held steady in his hand, his clothes speckled with fresh paint, his eyes shining. As soon as I stepped into the studio, a large canvas drew my attention . . . and immediately took my breath away. Incandescent colors glowed against a dark background that wasn’t quite blue or black or purple but somehow all of those. At first I thought the splatters were abstract, but when I looked closer, I saw shapes in the canvas—figures, flowers, wings. It took me a few minutes to realize what it reminded me of—the heather garden at Fort Tryon Park the night I first walked through it with Will, my sight heightened by his blood in my veins.

  My eyes brimming with tears, I turned to Zach. “How did you—?” I began, wanting to ask him how he’d seen through vampire eyes, but when I turned to him, I saw my father standing beside him looking at the painting with his eyes also full of tears.

  “When I look at this,” Roman said, “I see the Luxembourg Gardens on the first evening I walked through them with Margot.”

  Zach nodded and I realized that the sight Zach had used to paint this wasn’t supernatural, it was the sight of first love. But whom had Zach loved like this? I watched him as he showed us painting after painting—he’d done more than a dozen since December—each one a breathtaking explosion of color and form. After the first one, my father stopped looking at the paintings and watched me looking at them instead. When Zach raced to the other side of the loft to retrieve something he said he wanted to give me, my father turned to me.

  “So,” he said in a low voice, “am I crazy or are these”—he waved his hand at the light-filled canvases—“something?”

  “Oh, these are something, all right. These are everything. There are whole worlds in these paintings. Only”—I too, lowered my voice—“was Zach in love with somebody he lost?” I thought my father would ask what gave me that idea—how could I see the history of a lost love affair in abstract splatters of paint?—but he didn’t. He only smiled sadly and said, “Didn’t you know? Zach was in love with your mother.”

  I opened my mouth to ask questions. How long? Did you know? Were they lovers? But Zach had come back with a rolled-up piece of paper. “I came across this when I was going through some old sketchbooks,” Zach said, handing me the paper. “I thought you’d want to have it.”

  I knew Zach had had a classical art education before he’d become an abstract painter, but I’d never seen anything he’d done that wasn’t abstract. This was a portrait of my mother, sketched in pencil. She was sitting by a pond looking into the water at her own reflection.

  “Thank you, Zach,” I said. “It’s beautiful.” When I looked up, my father was smiling at Zach. I saw now why the two men were so close—why my father had stood by Zach all these years when he couldn’t paint a thing, and why Zach had sat beside my father every day he was in the hospital. They were united in having loved the same woman and having lost her. I might not have understood once, but I understood now. If I had known someone who had loved Will the way I did—Marguerite D’Arques or Madame Dufay, say—I would gladly have stayed by her side.

  As the long winter lost its grip and spring finally began, I found that there was plenty to keep me busy. To our surprise, Sotheby’s in Paris had expressed an interest in offering the Pissarros in their spring Impressionist auction, so I had to oversee the paperwork, catalog copy, and their shipping.

  I also had a lot of signet medallions to make. Rather than hurt my business, the recession had made moderately priced jewelry with mottoes such as HOPE, FAITH, and HARD TIMES MAKE ME STRONGER more popular than ever. It was difficult, at first, to work with my scarred right hand, but I eventually got enough mobility back to handle the soldering iron. What I couldn’t do, though, was snap my fingers on that hand, so I didn’t know if I could still produce fire, but I did feel a tug in the palm of my hand that pointed toward true north. That and my ability to see auras and hear thoughts were the only proofs I had that what I had been through was real. I sometimes wondered if those talents might be figments of my imagination, but I squelched such worries (along with any temptation to test those powers by playing mental guessing games or
jumping off the Empire State Building) with more hard work.

  What kept me busiest was getting the gallery ready for Zach’s show, which was scheduled for the last week in May, on the same day as the Sotheby’s auction in Paris. I was worried at first that my father had given us too little time to publicize the show adequately, but I needn’t have been; the show seemed to publicize itself. The entire art community was fascinated with the idea of a fading star making a comeback. “I think they want good news,” Captain Sullenberger modestly said of the public’s response to his heroic landing, “I think they want to feel hopeful again.” Perhaps watching a washed-up, alcoholic painter pick himself up and create beautiful work again was just such another sign of hope. There was so much preshow buzz, in fact, that I worried Zach might crack under the pressure, but he took it all in good humor, radiating a calm and steadiness I’d never seen in him before. When the paintings were hung, I saw at last that there was nothing to worry about. In the empty gallery moments before the show was scheduled to begin, the paintings themselves radiated an aura of peace and beauty.

  “Surprising,” I heard an NYU professor lecturing a group of art students, “given the artist’s turbulent past. But the riot of color and movement seems to lead the viewer through great cataclysms of experience into a hard-won serenity.”

  I wondered what experience the professor saw in the paintings. The show was called “Elements,” and the four largest canvases were entitled Air, Earth, Water, and Fire. I saw in them my flight over the city, the pain in Noam Erdmann’s eyes when he pressed the compass stone into my flesh, the longing of Melusine for the pure springs, and a bonfire burning on the shore of Governors Island, its flames reaching toward the stars. I saw too, the last flight of the sylphs when Oberon had released their souls into the ether, and a torch-lit garden party in eighteenth-century Versailles. As I circulated around the gallery, I heard a jaded art critic enthuse that one piece brought him back to his grandmother’s garden and a young hedge fund manager say that another made her think of an idyllic summer she’d spent lifeguarding on the Jersey shore when she was a teenager. Whatever they all saw in Zach’s paintings, they wanted them. Every painting was sold before the end of the show.