Black Swan Rising

by Lee Carroll

  “I don’t need—” I began to explain that I didn’t need food for anyone but myself, but the baker had already disappeared into the back room. A man’s voice—a rich bass that sounded as if it belonged to a golden-age radio announcer—asked, “Is she the one who went into Dee’s yesterday?”

  The baker’s murmured reply was impossible to make out, but whatever it was seemed to startle the man. “The swan?” he boomed. “The black swan?”

  I looked down at the swan signet ring on my right hand. That’s what the baker had been looking at. It was also what the jeweler—John Dee, where had I heard that name before?—had noticed yesterday. But what could an old signet ring my mother gave me have to do with anything?

  The baker returned with two large brown bags. I reached into my coat pocket for my wallet but the baker shook her head. “It’s on the house. Savory tea pies,” she said, holding up the bag in her right hand, “and scones,” holding up the one in her left. Before I could object, she pressed both bags into my arms. They were warm and deliciously fragrant.

  “Thank you, it’s awfully kind of you . . .” I fell silent because I was afraid I might start to cry.

  “No, no, no!” she said, waving her arms. “Please don’t thank me. You need some sustenance after what you’ve been through.”

  I was about to ask her how she knew that I’d been through anything, but the ting of an oven timer summoned her away. No doubt I looked as if I’d been through hell, I told myself, and really, I had been. Now, though, I just felt drained and exhausted . . . and hungry. I needed to go home and try to make sense of what I’d learned and then figure out a way to track down this John Dee fellow. As I turned to go, I remembered where I’d seen the name John Dee before. It had been on the Wikipedia list of famous alchemists I’d looked up when I brought home the silver box. John Dee was a famous alchemist and astronomer. An Elizabethan alchemist and astronomer. The original John Dee had been dead for nearly four hundred years.

  I walked back to the town house, cradling the warm bags in my arms. I was so weak with hunger that I almost sat down on a curb to eat the contents right there, but I was only a few blocks away. When I got to the town house, I was relieved to see that Maia, whom I had called earlier, had put a notice on the gallery door informing our patrons that the gallery was temporarily closed for repairs. I let myself into the house and started back toward the kitchen . . . but froze when I heard a loud crash from the back of the house. An image of the black-clad shadowmen came back to me. It was all I could do to force myself down the hall, clutching the warm bakery bags to my chest as if they could protect me.

  Instead of burglars, though, I found Becky Jones and Jay Fine, my two best friends since high school. Jay was on his knees by the safe door scrubbing the floor. Becky was sweeping up broken pottery. The back door to the garden was propped open by a kitchen chair, which had toppled over—no doubt the source of the crash I’d heard. As soon as she saw me, Becky dropped the broom and held out her arms. I barely had time to put the bags on the table before Becky wrapped her arms around me, her chin hitting my armpit. She squeezed tight and then took a step back and swatted me hard on the arm.

  “Why didn’t you call us?” she asked. “And why don’t you have your cell phone on?” Like most of our generation Becky couldn’t imagine going five minutes without checking her cell phone. Maybe because I had grown up with older parents who had a more old-world sensibility in a house with windup clocks and record-playing phonographs, I wasn’t quite as attached to the new technology. Becky accused me of being a Luddite; Jay thought it was kind of cool and steampunk.

  “I forgot my phone when I went back to the hospital,” I said. “And I was going to call, but one thing happened after another. How did you find out?”

  “Maia called us.” Jay sat back on his heels and dropped the sponge into a bucket of water. Red water. “We came right over, but then we didn’t know where you were. Maia let us in. She said that the police said it was okay to clean up.”

  “Where were you?” Becky demanded, punching my arm again. For a tiny girl—she claimed five feet but I knew she was really four feet eleven and a half—Becky’s punch packed a wallop. She had so much bottled energy inside her that it seemed to crackle from the ends of her tightly curled brown hair. When she played drums onstage, she sometimes seemed to hover midair above her drum set. Jay, on the other hand, was slow and deliberate. I often wondered how they played music together, but their band, London Dispersion Force, had been going nonstop since college. They’d just come back from a tour of England and they were recording their first album on a small indie label.

  “I took a walk after visiting my father in the hospital . . . and got some food.” I gestured toward the bags. “Aren’t you guys playing at Irving Plaza tonight? I’m surprised Fiona let you out.” Fiona was the lead vocalist and business manager of London Dispersion Force and a stickler for rehearsal times.

  “Fiona said to tell you that if you find out what a-holes did this to you and Roman, she’ll take care of them,” Becky said.

  For the second time today I felt my eyes filling up with tears. Apparently baked goods and threats of vengeance made me sentimental.

  “Why don’t you sit down,” Jay said, pulling a chair out for me. Jay was the one who always noticed when someone was skating on thin ice. Beneath his laid-back exterior, he was the sensitive one in the band—the one who wrote the song lyrics and made sure everyone was okay. “And tell us all about it.”

  “I’ll make some tea.” Becky was already at the sink, filling the kettle. The sight of tears always made her get busy.

  “Okay. I’ve got some food.” I pointed to the bags on the table. “There’s plenty for all of us . . .” I stared at the bags and felt a sudden lurch in my empty stomach. How had the baker at Puck known I would need extra for my friends?

  “I simply refuse to believe your father arranged the burglary.” Becky swept away any possibility of Roman James’s culpability as neatly as she swept the pastry crumbs off the table. Crumbs were practically all that was left of the two bags of savory tea pies and scones. They were so delicious—the pies had held an assortment of mincemeat, eggs, cheese, leeks, and something with curry; the scones had come with clotted cream and raspberry jam—that I had to resist the urge to lick the buttery flakes not just from my fingers, but from Becky’s and Jay’s fingers and chins as well. A feeling of warmth and contentment spread out from my stomach to the tips of my fingers and toes. My friends’ steadfast belief in my father’s innocence was no small part of the pleasure I felt.

  “No way,” Jay said, leaning back and rubbing his swollen belly. “He wouldn’t let those thugs into the house with you here. I say this Dee guy you met at the jewelry store is behind the whole thing. If he was legit, then why would he have packed up shop so suddenly and gone to such lengths to make it look like the shop hadn’t been occupied in years? And why would he use the name of a dead alchemist? It’s obviously an alias. It all smells like a con game. I bet he put some kind of drug in that box that knocked you out.”

  I smiled at Jay. He was a big fan of pulp fiction—Doc Savage and The Shadow—and loved elaborate explanations for everyday occurrences. “But even if that were possible, Jay, I wandered into his store randomly.” In my head, though, I heard the baker at Puck saying that the rain had pushed me into Dee’s doorway, the rain that hadn’t been in the weather forecast, but I dismissed the idea. I was grateful that neither of my friends had suggested I had the wrong store—or that I’d made the whole thing up; I wasn’t going to impose on their credulity any further by talking about supernatural weather or dybbuks or the blue symbols I’d hallucinated inside the silver box. “How could Dee really have set up such an elaborate scheme on such short notice?”

  “Clearly he was organized enough to vacate his store and make it look like it hadn’t been used in years,” Becky said. “I say you’re dealing with a clever mastermind.”

  “An evil genius!” Jay added in an o
minous low voice.

  “Thank you, Orson Welles.” Becky swatted Jay with a dish towel. “You have to give Detective Kiernan John Dee’s name and the address of the store. Maybe he’s a known con man.”

  “Sure. I’ll just tell him that the baker at Puck’s told me that John Dee, Elizabethan alchemist, who resides at 121½ Cordelia Street, an abandoned storefront, has our Pissarros. I’m sure he’ll drop the investigation of my father immediately.”

  As Becky and Jay exchanged a look, I was sorry I’d let myself sound as bitter and discouraged as I felt. Especially around Jay. I knew he picked up on people’s unhappiness and took it on himself.

  “You need some rest, James,” Becky said. “We’ll stay and keep you company. You shouldn’t be alone here. What if those thugs come back?”

  “No way! You have that gig at Irving Plaza tonight, which—shit!” I looked at the clock over the stove and got to my feet. “Which you’re going to be late for. And I have to get back to the hospital to check on Roman. I promise I’ll be fine.”

  Becky looked as if she were going to launch into a speech, but Jay silenced her with a look—no mean feat. “We’ll walk you to St. Vincent’s then,” he said. “And we’ll come back here after the last set. It’s easier than hauling the equipment back to Williamsburg anyway.”

  I couldn’t argue with Jay’s plan. The truth was I didn’t relish the idea of being alone in the town house with the thought that those hollow-eyed men might come back.

  Jaws

  My father was sleeping when I checked in on him at St. Vincent’s, and my favorite nurse—whose first name, I learned, was Obie—assured me that he was doing fine. “Don’t you worry; I’ll watch out for him tonight. You hurry on home.” He glanced out the window beside my father’s bed. “Looks like some weather’s coming up from the south.”

  Obie Smith was right. A cold, needle-sharp rain was falling when I left the hospital. I turned my coat collar up and bowed my head, wishing I’d brought a hat or an umbrella. But the air had been dry and crisp when I’d left the house. On the corner of Seventh Avenue and Twelfth Street I looked north toward midtown. The lights of the avenue shone clear white against a cobalt sky. But when I looked south, I couldn’t make out the opposite street corner for the fog. It was as if the southern tip of Manhattan had been swallowed by a cloud.

  Weird weather, I thought crossing the avenue, perhaps another sign of global warming. But it wasn’t anything to get nervous about. There were plenty of people on Greenwich Avenue walking toward me . . .

  I stopped on the corner of Jane and looked around me. All the pedestrians on Greenwich were walking toward Seventh Avenue, none were walking toward Eighth. Could there be a parade or an event I didn’t know about? But what parade fell in the middle of December? Maybe they were all heading over to Irving Plaza to hear London Dispersion Force, I thought, determined to think positively.

  The fog was worse on Jane Street: a viscous clot of curdled cream, tinged yellow and faintly redolent of rotten eggs, sort of the same odor the shadowmen had given off. This couldn’t be freak weather—it had to be a water-main break or a gas leak. Maybe I should go back . . . but back where? I was exhausted. All I wanted was to be in my own home in my own bed. The banister of my stoop loomed up out of the fog. I’d go inside and watch the TV news to find out what was going on.

  After I unlocked the door, entered, and punched in the alarm code, I leaned my back against the door as if to keep the fog outside. Only the fog seemed to already be inside. The hallway was murky, the shadowed corners smeary and blurred. I must be getting one of my migraines. The distinctive jagged-edged blind spot that always heralded the headaches, which I’d grown to think of as an evil airborne sprite, was bobbing across my line of vision. It was no wonder after all I’d been through. I needed to take two Advils and lie in a dark room for ten hours. That was all.

  I trudged up the two flights of stairs recalling how my mother used to say that we’d need to install an elevator when she was an old lady.

  “You’ll never be an old lady,” Roman would always quip, meaning, of course, that my beautiful mother would never look old, not that she would die in a car crash at sixty-one. Roman had been right about one thing: Margot James had still looked like a woman in her thirties when she died.

  When I opened my apartment door, I found that Becky and Jay had been up there too. Someone had swept up the paper confetti and dusted away the fingerprint powder and someone (Becky, probably, whose carpentry skills had been honed during a summer working for Habitat for Humanity) had nailed a board over the broken skylight. I could see a sliver of sky between the board and the frame, though; I hoped Becky had been a little more thorough in those homes in Ecuador. It even looked as if Becky had gotten to do what she’d been threatening to do for years: she’d dusted and polished my shelves of jewelry supplies and scrap metal. The bent street signs, discarded bicycle wheels, lengths of chain, and junk car parts that I had culled from city streets and abandoned warehouses gleamed like brand-new toys. Even the tanks of acetylene and oxygen looked as if they’d been wiped down with a rag. The one object that hadn’t been dusted was the dragon sculpture that hung over the worktable. Becky thought it was creepy. I couldn’t blame her.

  The head was a hydraulic spreader and cutter that I’d found in a dump out in Greenpoint. Even lying in a heap of garbage it had looked like the snout of a reptilian monster. It was the monster I saw every night in my dreams. The last time I had seen it in real life had been when my mother died.

  I was sixteen. My mother had rented a car to drive me to a college interview at the Rhode Island School of Design. We’d argued the whole way back, driving through a snowstorm, over where I wanted to go to school. I was so angry at her that I moved to the backseat when we stopped for gas. I had decided I would rather stay in the city and go to FIT. It was a fraction of the cost of a private school such as RISD and way less pretentious. My mother kept insisting that she’d find resources to send me to RISD. “You can be anything you want to be, Garet. You have to be free to choose . . . you’ll be better off out of the house.”

  “So I don’t have to listen to you and Dad fighting?” I’d asked, putting on my Walkman headphones and turning my head to the window, which was fogged over by the falling snow. I was still staring out the right rear-seat window when the driver of a red Ford Expedition changed lanes without checking her blind spot and rammed into our rental, flipping it over and sending it skidding across three lanes of traffic. A second SUV hit the upended left rear fender at an angle, sending our car spinning into a low concrete wall against which it came to rest. I found myself pinned between two walls of metal, the passenger-side door and an accordioned version of the door on the other side. I could see the back of my mother’s head and hear my name being said over and over.

  “Garet, can you hear me? Are you okay? Garet?”

  “I’m here, Mom. I’m okay, but I can’t move. Are you okay?”

  My mother hadn’t answered at first and then she told me that she was fine. She told me that she was sorry we’d argued about college. She trusted me to make the right decision for myself. “Marguerite,” she said, using the French version of my name, which she always pronounced like an endearment, “always trust your own instincts. You’re a rare bird . . . unique . . . think for yourself . . .”

  She’d said something else that I lost in the blare of sirens that suddenly surrounded us. The face of a man in a fire helmet appeared at the driver’s-side window and my mother said something to him that I couldn’t hear. Then the man was at my window, his face a menacing red from the emergency lights pulsing behind him.

  “There’s something else I need to tell you,” my mother was shouting over the sirens.

  “It’s okay, Mom, they’re getting us out,” I screamed back at her.

  “Yes, yes, but just in case, honey—”

  Whatever my mother was about to say was obliterated by the screech of tearing metal. Something rammed into the twisted
doorframe. It looked like the snout of a giant beast and as I watched in horrified awe, it spread its jaws and let out an anguished scream.

  Later I would understand that the rescue workers were using a hydraulic spreader and cutter—the so-called Jaws of Life—to cut me out of the wrecked car, and the sound I heard was the sound of ripping metal. But to me it would always seem as if the thing itself had opened its jaws and screamed.

  When the fireman pulled me out of the car, I was screaming too, yelling at the man to go back and get my mother. We’d only gone ten yards or so when the car exploded into a ball of flames that narrowly missed us. Later I would learn that my mother had been impaled on the steel rod of the crushed steering wheel. She wouldn’t have lived even if they’d gotten her out. Guessing that, my mother had told the fireman to get me out instead. I’ve always felt, though, as if I had been snatched from my mother by that screaming, snapping thing, the Jaws of Life.

  A few years later—in my senior year at FIT—I found the one I had now and knew immediately what I wanted to do with it. I had taken it home and using chain links and spare automobile parts welded it into a fire-breathing dragon. I called it Jaws. I thought it would be cathartic to turn my worst nightmare into a piece of art. After all, isn’t that what art is all about? Turning chaos and pain into something meaningful? Looking at the creature now, though, all I saw was how scared I’d been in the days right after my mother had died, terrified that if my father were sent to prison, I’d be as good as an orphan. And here I was back in the same place. I’d almost lost my father last night. If Roman was convicted of arranging the robbery, I’d lose him to prison. How long would a man his age survive there? I might have been ten years older than when my mother died, but I was no more ready to be alone.