The Watchtower

gardener from the labyrinth. “Bon jour, Solange! Ça va?” Monsieur Lutin called to the gardener. “I just need to pick a few samples for a friend. D’accord? ” The gardener smiled and waved back at Monsieur Lutin as if he was used to seeing three-feet-tall gnomes wandering around the Alpine Garden.
    “So what happened then?” I asked as Monsieur Lutin stooped to pick a long-stemmed, blue flower.
    “As the boat people created their doors, they shut others. The fabric of mist, which had flowed freely over this world, evaporated. Creatures like myself could no longer slip from world to world. Some were trapped in the Summer Country, others like myself were trapped in this world.”
    “Kind of like the Berlin Wall.”
    “Yes, and the boat people became the gatekeepers, deciding who could and couldn’t travel to the Summer Country. As you can imagine, that made them unpopular with some, but then it also made it very important to keep on their good side if you wanted to ever be able to visit your relatives.… Ah, blue gentian, she’ll like those.… But then even the boat people began to lose their ability to move from world to world. If they became too attached to a human, for instance…”
    Monsieur Lutin interrupted his narrative to scramble up a rock outcropping to pick a white, woolly flower that I thought might be edelweiss. I was standing by a small ornamental pool into which a miniature waterfall flowed. The scene reminded me of the brief glimpse I’d had of the Summer Country, when I’d had to step in front of the silver box to close it. I’d seen the enchanted pool with a black swan floating on it. Transported back in time, I’d seen an ancient story reenacted before me: a youth who’d followed his true love to the swan pool at sunset even though he’d been forbidden to do so, watching the woman he loved turn into a black swan. The swan maiden, seeing that she’d been betrayed, had begun to fly away, back to the Summer Country, and the young man, unable to bear losing her, had lifted his bow and shot her.
    “Like the first Marguerite,” I said to Monsieur Lutin, who’d climbed back down and was standing by my side looking into the little pool. “She made her beloved promise not to come to the swan pool when she turned back into a swan, but he did and then shot her with an arrow.”
    “Only to keep her from leaving him,” Monsieur Lutin said, taking my hand and leading me to a little bench in a patch of sunshine in a secluded spot. “She wasn’t killed, but she could never go back to the Summer Country again. For love of the young man she pledged herself to protect humankind forever. She became one of the four Watchtowers.”
    “But why? A human had betrayed her. Shouldn’t that have made her hate human beings?”
    “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Most of the fey who are betrayed by humans do hate them. They become vengeful.” He motioned for me to bend down so he could whisper in my ear even though we were alone in this part of the garden. “Some say that the fey who were captured and tortured by humans because the humans believed they were demons became demons. Imagine being tortured by the creatures you loved, whom you thought of as your children.”
    Although we were sitting in the warm sun, I shivered. If what Monsieur Lutin said was true, then human beings had created demons. “It would drive you mad.”
    “Yes. But your ancestor Marguerite became all the more attached to humans. Marguerite knew that her human lover betrayed her because he wanted to keep her with him. She never forgot the intensity of his love for her. Now the boat people, they both love and hate humans. They’ve tasted the human’s ability to love and they’ve become addicted to it. They seek out human lovers who will sing their praises, sculpt them in marble, paint their faces, and write love poems to them. In exchange the humans they touch taste immortality. The world’s greatest art comes from these unions, but they’re fragile. They never last long.”
    I nodded. “I know. My father is an art dealer so I grew up among artists. I’ve seen what happens to them when their inspiration deserts them.” I remembered my father’s protégé, Santé Leon, who killed himself just before his first big show at the Whitney. And my father’s best friend, Zach Reese, who had turned to drink when he couldn’t paint anymore. At least Zach had started painting again, but so many others had been damaged