The Changeling. Victor LaValle
stopped moving, even breathing, and watched his baby boy labor to his lift his head. This small act, working to develop the muscles of his neck, would someday lead to sitting up, crawling, stumbling, sprinting. All that began here and now, in this basement of a Riverdale home. Apollo felt so fortunate to witness it. With the baby only two months old, Apollo was a mess of raw nerves. He got back to work just to keep from crying.
The books in the first box were worthless, so Apollo moved on to the second. The second box had as little to offer as the first. The third box, too.
“Brian left a book behind. A children’s book that he used to read to me. It’s called Outside Over There. I know it from memory by now.”
The fourth box had nothing good in it and neither did the fifth. Brian’s head lowered, the muscles exhausted, so Apollo turned him over again. The baby whimpered there on his back, so Apollo came closer to check him. After pulling off socks and shoes and pants, undoing the snaps on the onesie, he found the cause. As he changed Brian’s diaper, he spoke to his son again.
“‘When Papa was away at sea,’” Apollo recited. “That’s how the book begins. That’s the first page. Papa is gone and Mama sits out in an arbor. I had no idea what an arbor was. It’s basically a small wooden structure people put out in their gardens, like a trellis. She sits on a bench underneath the arbor. So dad is far away and mom is outside in the garden.”
He wrapped the boy back up, slipped the piss diaper into the special pouch provided in the diaper bag, and put away the wipes and the tube of coconut oil.
“But inside the house there’s a little girl named Ida. She’s very young, but she’s left to take care of her baby sister all on her own. She plays a horn for the baby to try and help it sleep. But she’s looking out the window while she makes music. She’s in the same room, but even she’s not watching the baby. And that’s when the goblins sneak in.”
Brian fell asleep. Apollo scooted backward quietly. Two more boxes to go. When he opened the sixth, a cloud of fungus funk entered the air. Every book in this one, all hardcovers, showed black spots on the endpapers. Worthless. Ruined. Only one box left.
Brian sighed in his slumber. It looked like contentedness, comfort. The seventh box could wait. Apollo took out his phone. Emma would want to see Brian like this, the holy vulnerability of their sleeping infant. He snapped eleven pictures and sent all of them to Emma’s phone, even the blurry ones. He couldn’t bear to erase even those. Then he went on Facebook and posted all eleven again. Lillian joined Facebook the day Brian was born, and she always wanted more images of the kid. This is how he justified what he did even as he knew what kind of parent he’d become, the kind that used to make him gag as recently as two months ago. The ones who blithely assumed their online friends were gluttons for punishment. Here’s my baby lying on his back! And here’s my baby also lying on his back! And how about this one: blurry baby on his back! Good God, the vanity of it all, the epic self-centeredness. He knew all this, and still he uploaded eleven pictures of Brian. Decorum be damned, he was in love. Then he hit “post.”
While Brian slept, Apollo turned back to the last box in the basement. He decided he’d go slow with this one. At the very least it would save him from checking too quickly for likes on all Brian’s photos.
A SCREAMING COMES INTO the apartment. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. This time it’s the loudest Emma Valentine has ever heard. It’s Apollo, practically howling, as he unlocks the front door and rushes the living room with their son wriggling in the BabyBjörn. At first she thinks maybe Brian has been hurt, but Apollo’s holding a book out in front of him like a shield. To make the moment more chaotic, Emma has the television on and the breast pump running. Their apartment sounds as loud as a rocket attack during World War II.
“I got it, I got it, I got it!” Apollo shouted, as he had been shouting since, well, since he’d strapped Brian back into his rear-facing car seat and drove the Honda Odyssey home. He’d been chanting those three words all along the Henry Hudson Parkway, then when he got pulled over by the police and was given a ticket for driving “less than the normal speed of traffic.”
Apollo had incredibly important news to share with his wife, the kind of thing that would bear no interruption. Or so he thought. Now he lowered the book in his left hand slightly, and with his free hand he pointed at his wife’s chest.
“What are you wearing?”
Emma Valentine looked down at her chest. She wore a beige nursing bra, and a pair of suction cups were attached to the nipples. Those cups fed into a pair of small plastic bottles collecting her breast milk. A pair of clear tubes, each thinner than a straw, ran from the cups toward a breast pump on the floor. The pump remained on, generating a repetitive sucking noise like something a mechanical squid would make as it thrust itself through the sea. Emma stooped and turned off the machine. She stood again.
“How have I never seen you using that thing?”
“You’ve seen me use the breast pump,” she said.
“But not with that bra attachment. It’s like hands-free milking.”
“I don’t want you to call it ‘milking.’ I’m ‘pumping.’”
She mimed a soft slap in his face, then pulled at the BabyBjörn so she could look at Brian. She didn’t wait for Apollo to unstrap the kid but did it for him with one hand. With the other she detached the cups from her bra and brought Brian to her chest. He sniffed the air, an animal out to root, and attempted to latch. It took two tries but Emma remained patient and sure until they were connected.
“How was the first day?” Apollo asked.
She might’ve answered him, but Brian’s face captured her attention, and she went quiet watching him. “I missed you,” she whispered. “I missed you.” She contorted her neck so she could kiss the boy’s head even as he suckled.
The television remained the only thing making noise now. It showed a home improvement show.
“I’m just not sure we’ll get this whole project done in five weeks,” a man on the screen said, speaking directly to the camera.
“We’ll blow our budget if we don’t,” the woman beside him said.
Emma picked up the remote and muted the screen. She settled onto the couch, never once looking away from Brian.
On the television the man and woman who’d been fretting about budgets and timetables wore clear goggles and swung sledgehammers at the walls of an ugly kitchen.
“That part looks like fun,” Apollo said.
“I like to watch the demolition,” Emma said, smelling Brian’s ears as she sat on the couch.
Sitting together, Apollo finally revealed the object he’d been holding when he entered the apartment screaming.
“To Kill a Mockingbird,” Emma read aloud.
Apollo opened the book, flipping to the copyright page. “A true first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird,” he said. “With the original cover. The whole thing in Fine condition. That alone would make this worth five thousand dollars. When she dies, that’ll at least double the price.”
Emma winced.
“Did he bite you?”
“No. What you said was morbid.”
“Sorry.”
Emma leaned against Apollo, shifting Brian so he tucked closer against her ribs.
“You know Harper Lee never does interviews or anything, but she also never signs books.” Apollo opened to the title page. “Well, she signed this one.”
Emma lifted her head. “Wow. And she signed it to someone. Pip. Who’s Pip?”