by Lee Carroll
There was still no change.
“Come on,” I whispered to the metal, my breath steaming my visor. “Don’t be a bitch.”
As if responding to my voice, the metal seam beneath the torch point silkened and gleamed like a bright ribbon. It was beginning to melt.
“There’s a good girl,” I cooed. I ran the torch along the seam of the box until the metal seal began to bubble. With my other hand I inserted the steel blade in between the lid and the base and ran it all the way around the three sides of the box and then underneath the round insignia. The metal around the seal began to glow, then the whole lozenge glowed white—all except for the figure of the rearing swan in the center. It remained black against the glowing white, like the silhouette of a black swan rising out of a shimmering sunlit pool. For a moment, I could have sworn I heard the sound of wings beating the air, then something popped and the white light enveloped and blinded me.
It was a light I could almost feel. An energy that made my bones vibrate, my blood tingle, and every hair on my body stand on end. It was like jumping into an ice-cold lake on a summer day or stepping into a hot bath full of fizzing bath salts or . . . no, it was like nothing I had ever felt before. It was like being truly alive for the first time. I knew instantly that if I lived through it I would spend the rest of my life trying to duplicate the sensation.
When the light faded, I looked down at my arms and legs almost expecting to see burnt stubs, but nothing was even singed.
You’re okay, you’re okay, I said over and over as I patted myself down. I heard the ghost of my mother’s voice in the words. It’s what she said when I fell down or banged my head on something. You’re okay, I repeated, trying to slow my racing heart. Nothing was hurt, not even . . . I looked at the box and my heart shuddered to a halt.
It was open. A plume of blue smoke rose up from inside it, drifted toward the ceiling, and coiled around the metal dragon like a second airborne serpent. Mixed in with the smoke were flakes of soot fluttering in the air. But what stopped my heart was what I saw inside the box on the underside of the lid. Blue shapes glowed against the molten white of the silver, shapes that moved like icons scrolling across a computer screen.
I stepped closer and reached out a trembling gloved hand to touch the inside of the lid. A blue crescent moon morphed into a circle doubly bisected with two crossed lines and then changed into a triangle with a dot in its center. An upside-down eye turned into the letter Z, then the number 7, then into something that looked like a paramecium.
I closed my eyes, desperately hoping that when I opened them the illusion would be gone. When I had developed the symptoms of ocular migraines at sixteen, I thought at first that I was going crazy. Growing up in a house frequented by artists, I couldn’t help hearing about those who had gone over the edge. Living on that edge had seemed to be both the gift and the burden of being an artist. And wasn’t my mother always telling me how talented I was? Did that mean that I, too, had the potential of slipping over the edge of the rational world into madness? It had been a colossal relief when the eye doctor told me that the flashes of light, jagged-edged blind spots, and blurry coronas were normal. But what if he’d been wrong? What if those symptoms were only the beginning and now I really was going crazy?
I opened my eyes. The symbols were gone. The box had turned from white back to silver. Polished silver. There wasn’t a trace of tarnish on it. Okay, I thought, the lid had been treated with some kind of chemical. The symbols were scratched into each layer so that they appeared as the box heated and then cooled—the way lemon juice becomes visible on paper when held to a flame. Feeling a little better at the explanation, I took off my visor and gloves and touched the metal. It was slightly warm, but not too hot to touch. I lifted it and looked inside.
The box was empty.
I looked again at the flakes floating down through the air. They weren’t soot, as I had first thought, they were charred scraps of paper. The papers that had been in the box had ignited when it flew open (How had it opened?). One fragment, which had landed by the side of the box, contained an ornate archaic script that I couldn’t begin to read right now with my vision this blurred and my hands still shaking so hard. The only part I could make out was the signature—Will Hughes, writ large with an elaborate flourish just under the wax seal imprint of the swan insignia. The rest of whatever papers had been in the box had been reduced to confetti, feathery flakes in pale shades of white and mauve, turning my worktable into that snowy field in France Pissarro had painted over a century ago.
Shadowmen
After I cleaned up the paper confetti and stored it away in the box so I could show the jeweler tomorrow what had become of its contents, I closed the lid and left it on the worktable. I considered putting it in the safe where I kept my gold and silver supplies, but the whole house was alarmed. There was no reason to put it away unless my real motive was to keep me safe from it . . . and that was just silly.
I took the one large scrap of paper and the silver seal that I had pried off the box with me into my bedroom though, because I wanted to look at them again when my vision cleared. I put them on my night table while I got undressed. The visual hallucinations were dissipating and I hadn’t burned myself, I thought as I crawled under the covers and wrapped my arms around myself to stop my shivering. That strange sensation I’d felt when the light flashed . . . well, that was some sort of electrical charge—a shock, nothing more. And the tremors I felt now were from fatigue. It had been a long day. Before I turned off the bedside lamp, though, I took off the medallion I had made when I was sixteen (I usually slept with it on) and picked up the seal that had come off the box so that I could look at them side by side. Yes, they were almost identical, but there must have been many rings made with this seal. It didn’t mean anything. It was nice to have found a token that reminded me of my mother. Almost like a message from her. I fell asleep with the seal in my hand, my fingers tracing the shape of the swan beating its wings.
In my dream I stood on the edge of a round pool. The sun was low on the opposite shore, setting behind an old stone tower and turning the water into a glittering sheet of molten gold upon which swam a black swan. The scene was tranquil, but somehow I knew that something awful was about to happen. The bird sensed it too. The black swan craned its long neck forward, spread its wings, and began to take off. I noticed as the swan stretched its neck that a silver chain with a heavy pendant lay on its breast feathers. Then, just as the swan’s wing tips cleared the surface of the water, I felt something whiz past my ear, and then an anguished cry rent the still golden surface of the lake. The air turned dark with black feathers as one minute I was watching from the shore, the next I was in the water . . . and then I was no longer even myself. I was, to my horror, the wounded swan. And I was making that horrible cry, a sound like the trumpets of Judgment Day.
It was the trumpet blare that woke me.
It took me only a second to identify the actual sound as the gallery alarm two floors below—a sound that made my blood freeze. Another second had me up, pulling on the jeans, sweatshirt, and workboots I had discarded beside the bed. One more and I was on the landing looking down through the stairwell. I heard the door on the floor below open and saw my father’s bald scalp appear at the banister.
“Dad!” I shouted over the insistent blat of the alarm. “It’s probably just a false alarm. Wait for the police to come.” But he couldn’t hear me—or chose not to. He ran down the stairs, his red paisley robe billowing loosely in the updraft from the first floor.
Which meant the front door was open.
I took off after him, my heart pounding with fear as I took the steps two at a time. Roman kept a gun in his night table—a souvenir from World War II. Had he been foolish enough to grab it?
Halfway down the second flight I heard a shout—my father’s voice—and then a gunshot. I took the last flight in two leaps and landed on the first floor on my knees. Ignoring the pain, I continued toward the kitch
en door, which stood wide-open at the end of the corridor. I reached the doorway in two long, awkward leaps . . . and then froze on the threshold. The scene inside was so bizarre I thought for a moment I had finally achieved my childhood dream of slipping into a painting: a surrealist work by Dalí or de Chirico.
There were three men, each dressed in identical black turtlenecks, black pants, black gloves, and black ski masks. They could have been shadows of men instead of men. One was kneeling next to a bundle of red cloth in the open doorway of the safe, using a box cutter to cut the canvas out of a picture frame. When he was done, he handed it to the second man, who rolled it into a tight tube and who then handed it to the third man, who put it in a long oblong bag, which, I noticed with a queasy sense of the absurd, was a yoga-mat bag. I could almost have laughed. Except then I looked down and saw that the bundle of red cloth on the floor beside the safe door was in fact my father, his red robe spread out around him and blood staining the white collar of his pajama top.
I made some kind of a sound then and they all looked up. They each turned their head up toward me at the exact same moment. They kept their eyes on me for what seemed like an eternity, long enough for a dozen thoughts to run through my head. Should I run? But how could I leave my father? Was my father dead? Would they kill me? And, I’m embarrassed to say, how will we ever get out of debt now if they take all our paintings?
They all turned away at the same moment. The man who had been cutting free the canvases closed the box cutter and stood up. The second man closed the safe door and the third zipped up the yoga-mat bag. Then they walked toward me.
I pressed myself against the wall of the hallway, repulsed at the thought of one of them touching me, but I couldn’t run; I had to get to my father. The shadowmen filed past me as if I weren’t there. A pungent odor filled the hall as they passed—rotten eggs and ash—and snaked into my nose and mouth, filling my lungs. The hallway darkened as they passed, as if the shadows in the corners stretched out to meet them, and then they turned at the stair post and started up the stairs.
As soon as they were past me, I ran to my father and knelt by his side, feeling for a pulse in his neck and stripping away the robe to find the bullet hole.
It was below his left collarbone, an inch above his heart. At least I hoped it was above his heart. I felt a faint fluttery pulse against my fingers. I got up just long enough to grab the cordless phone from its charger on the wall and yank the tea cloth out from under the teapot I had left on the table. I felt a tug of regret as the blown-glazed pot rolled onto the floor and shattered—it had been my mother’s—but dismissed it as I pressed the cloth against the wound and dialed 911. They told me the police and an ambulance were on the way. When I hung up, I listened for the sound of the burglars’ footsteps on the stairs, but with the wail of the alarm I couldn’t tell if they were coming back or not. Would they come back and shoot us? Should I try to drag my father out of the house? But how far could I get with him? Would I hurt him if I moved him? Finally, after what felt like an eternity, I heard the front door banging open and heavily shod feet running down the hall. I lifted my head to see two uniformed officers pointing guns at me.
“The burglars went upstairs,” I shouted over the alarm. “There are three of them. At least one must have had a gun because they shot my father.” As I said it, I tried to remember if I had actually seen any of the burglars holding a gun, but the officers had already turned and left. I could hear them running up the stairs.
I turned back to my father. His face was a sickly gray. “Dad?” I called. “Roman? Can you hear me?”
His eyes flickered open, but they couldn’t focus on me. He said something I didn’t understand. I leaned closer, angling my ear to his mouth.
“Die . . . die . . . ,” he croaked.
“No, Dad, you’re not going to die. I promise. The bullet missed your heart.” I tried to make my father look at me but his eyes were skittering back and forth around the room as if looking for something. I followed his gaze and saw my father’s old service revolver lying under the kitchen table. He had probably dropped it when the burglars shot him.
“Oh, Dad,” I said, stroking his head. “You should have left the gun upstairs. Maybe they wouldn’t have hurt you.”
My father shook his head again, his mouth working to tell me something. I leaned down closer so he wouldn’t have to work so hard.
“Dybbuk,” he said at last. It seemed to take all his energy to spit out the word. His eyes rolled back in his head and he lost consciousness. I felt his pulse stutter under my fingertips. Frantically, I moved my hands from his wound to his heart and pressed all my weight down—once, twice, three times—trying to remember what CPR looked like in the movies. I kept it up until an EMT knelt beside me and peeled my hands away. I hadn’t seen him come in, and yet the kitchen was suddenly full of people. Uniformed police officers, EMTs, a man in a gray trench coat dripping rain on the hardwood floors. They formed a moat around my father, pushing me back. I felt as I had in my dream when I stood on the shore of the lake watching the swan gliding toward its death, as if I were somehow floating above everything. The man in the trench coat was next to me, saying something, but I couldn’t hear him over the beating of the swan’s wings.
“What?” I said, turning to him and looking into his eyes.
“I said you look pale. You should sit down.”
I nodded, acceding to the man’s good sense, but as in my dream I could already feel myself falling into the lake, the shining water enveloping me in a blast of white light that felt—I had just time enough to think—oddly familiar.
I awoke in the ambulance.
“You passed out,” the EMT told me when I sat up. “So we put you in here with your father.”
“How is he?” My father’s face was covered with an oxygen mask and his eyes were closed.
“He’s lost a lot of blood and his BP’s low. Does he have a history of heart problems?”
“Angina. He had an angioplasty a year ago. Will he . . . is he . . . ?”
“He has a good shot . . . no pun intended. The bullet went in just above the heart, but there’s an exit wound a few inches higher in his shoulder. I think it missed the heart, so you could say he was lucky. The shooter must have been lower down . . . crouching or something. Did he surprise the burglars?”
“I suppose so. I came in after he was shot. One of the burglars was kneeling on the floor . . . he could have been the one who shot him.” Then where was the gun? The only gun I’d seen had been my father’s. “He was running down the stairs. He nearly ran into them.”
“The running and the shock have put a lot of stress on his heart, and he hit his head when he fell, but he sounds like a tough old guy—chasing after the bad guys!” The EMT looked up, a grin on his face that faded when he saw my face. “You don’t look so good, though. You’d better lie down. I don’t want you falling and hurting yourself. You would’ve banged your head hard if that detective didn’t catch you.”
I followed the EMT’s advice. I still felt, as I had right before I fainted, as if I weren’t completely tethered to my own body, as if I were floating above myself watching the ambulance speed toward St. Vincent’s Hospital, watching myself following my father’s supine body into the emergency room and holding his limp hand while his shoulder was stitched and he was hooked up to an IV. Who is that calm woman? I wanted to shout aloud. It couldn’t be me because inside my nerves were sizzling like firecrackers and my heart was beating to a wild drumbeat. Apparently the calm façade didn’t fool everyone; when the nurse noticed my color, he sent an orderly to get me a chair.
“I don’t want you passing out on my watch,” he scolded in a lilting West Indies accent that felt like a warm breeze wafting through the antiseptic ER. His skin was the color of oolong tea, his long, tightly coiled hair was held back with a bright orange bandanna. His name tag read O. Smith.
“Is he likely to regain consciousness, Mr. Smith?” I asked.
“Not with all the painkillers I just gave him, darling. And if he does, he won’t be making much sense. You might as well get some rest.” He spoke as if he were used to people doing what he said, but I shook my head.
“I’ll stay here,” I said. “I don’t want him waking up alone.”
After an hour or so my father was admitted to a room. There was an empty bed that O. Smith said I was welcome to lie down in, but I was afraid to go to sleep, afraid that if I didn’t keep watch over my father, he might slip away. So I sat in the straight-backed chair between my father’s bed and a window that faced Seventh Avenue. The sky was dark over the buildings across the street, but their topmost windows reflected the pearl gray light of dawn in the east. Yesterday’s rain had finally stopped. The air looked clear and cold. Steam rose from the grates in the street in sinuous plumes. I had grown up thinking that every city was festooned with the floating white puffs until my father explained that New York had an unusual system of steam pipes beneath the streets that predated the use of electricity.
“I thought the city was floating on a cloud the first time I saw it,” Roman had told me when he described sailing into New York Harbor in the late 1940s. “I thought I was dreaming.”
I had felt as a child that the steam rising from the grates and manholes was proof that there was another world below the surface of this one. Perhaps it was the world my mother talked about when she told me bedtime stories—the Summer Country, she called it, or the Fair Land, a place where it was always high summer but every flower that bloomed from early spring to late fall bloomed there all year long. A place where pure springs bubbled up from deep within the earth and spread over the green meadows like white lace and then gathered in a pool on which swans glided. Sometimes you caught a glimpse of the Summer Country in the green shimmer at the end of a wooded path, she told me, or in the reflection of a mountain pool, or even, sometimes, through an open door on a city street where there had been no door before and nothing but smooth stone when you went back for a second look. Because the door to the Summer Country opened only in a glimpse, never in a second look. You could never look for it, but you might slip into it unawares. And then you might spend a day there only to come back and find a score of years had passed in this world and all your friends and family had aged while you remained unchanged.