The Changeling. Victor LaValle
In the dark she held his hand. Though they wouldn’t have sex for another three hours, it would be accurate to say their first child—their only child—was conceived right then. A thought, an idea, a shared dream; parenthood is a story two people start telling together.
By April 1977 Lillian was showing. Brian found them a two-bedroom apartment in Jackson Heights. Their son came in September. Brian thought it would be weird to name a half-black kid Rocky, so instead they named him Apollo. Brian liked to carry the newborn in the crook of one arm, cooing to him, “You are the god, Apollo. Good night, my little sun.” And they lived happily ever after. At least for a few years.
By Apollo’s fourth birthday Brian West was gone.
Brian hadn’t run off with another woman or skipped town to move back to Syracuse. The man might as well have been erased from existence. He couldn’t be found because he’d left no trail, neither breadcrumbs nor credit card receipts. Gone. Disappeared. Vanished.
When Apollo was born, Brian and Lillian thought they’d reached the end of the story, but they’d been wrong. The wildness had only begun.
RIGHT AFTER BRIAN went missing, the boy began having a recurring dream. Since he was only four, Lillian couldn’t make much sense of the details. Most of it came in the long hurried babble of a scared child in the night, but she pieced it together. There was a man knocking at the front door. When Apollo unlocked it, the man pushed his way in. He knelt down in front of Apollo. He had a face, but he took off that face. The face underneath was the face of his daddy. Brian West opened his mouth, and a cloud spilled from his mouth. Apollo watched the fog roll out from his father’s throat and began to cry. The mist filled the apartment until the boy could hardly see. His daddy picked him up. Now the sound of rushing water, loud as a waterfall, filled the apartment. Apollo’s father carried him through the fog. His father finally spoke to him. Right about then Apollo would wake up screaming.
This nightmare came to the kid night after night for weeks. Apollo no longer wanted to sleep, and Lillian couldn’t shut her eyes because she knew, at some point, her four-year-old boy would be in terror.
You’re coming with me.
That’s what Brian told Apollo in the dream.
While trying to console him, Lillian asked why those words made him wake with such fear. His answer cut her down through flesh and bone. It wasn’t fear that made him cry out. It was longing.
“Why didn’t he take me with him?” Apollo said.
Eventually the nightmare passed, or at least, Apollo stopped talking about it. This let life reset to its new normal: Lillian, a single mother who worked full time, taking classes on Saturdays to become a legal secretary, and raising her child alone, a life both grueling and rewarding. Apollo, a bookish child, growing up to be self-contained and watchful.
They stumbled along like this for eight more years. By the time Apollo turned twelve, they never spoke of Brian West and neither expected to make him a topic of conversation for the rest of their days, but then one afternoon Apollo received a message from the man. A gift.
THIS WAS IN the fall of 1989, and Apollo Kagwa was a junior high school student at IS 237 in Flushing. With Brian gone Lillian reverted to her maiden name and she damn sure did the same for her son. He became a Kagwa by legal decree. They erased the West from their lives.
Even a self-contained and watchful kid like Apollo could end up running with a crew. He had two best friends and did well in American history with Mr. Perrault. Lillian had passed her classes to become a legal secretary and found a better job at a law firm in midtown Manhattan. But the work had her keeping even longer hours, not getting home until eight o’clock sometimes. Latchkey kid was the term. Adults lamented this new reality on the Donahue show. They scolded working mothers who were damaging their poor kids by their need to make a living.
Apollo spent that afternoon as kids do when they don’t have to be home right away: dipping into the nearby diner to play a few quarters’ worth of Galaga, then off to the bodega for quarter waters and chips, looping around the corner to Colden Street, where a game of running bases had popped off. He played for an hour or three, then headed upstairs. It had been—in all honesty—a day or two since he’d had a shower, and the game worked up a funk even he couldn’t ignore. Apollo turned on the shower and had stripped halfway down when he heard heavy knocking coming from the far end of the apartment. When he ignored it—probably just a neighbor looking for his mom—the pounding only got louder. The hot water in the shower started to form steam. When Apollo walked out of the bathroom, it looked as if he’d stepped out of a cloud.
He’d made it halfway across the apartment before a prickly feeling ran across his neck. The knocking at the door continued, but he looked behind him to find the steam in the bathroom flowing out into the hall, as if it was following him. Apollo felt woozy just then. As if, without knowing it, he’d taken a step into someone’s dream. His own dream. He felt jolted by the realization. He’d had this dream, night after night, when he was young. How young? Three or four? There had been knocking at the door, and the sound of running water, the apartment dense with fog and . . .
He ran for the front door. As soon as he got close, the knocking stopped abruptly.
“Wait for me,” he whispered. He felt stupid when he said it. Even stupider when he repeated it.
His father was not on the other side of the door. His father was not on the other side of the door. His father was not.
And still Apollo snapped the locks open. He felt as if he was shrinking. How had he opened the door in that dream? How had he reached the top lock when he was only a small child? Anything was possible in a dream. How about now then? Maybe he’d fallen asleep in the bathroom, sitting in the tub, and some random firing of electricity in his brain had helped this fantasy resurface. Apollo decided not to care. There was a certain freedom in knowing you were in a dream. If nothing else, he might open the door and see his father and be reminded of the man’s features. He couldn’t remember them anymore. But when he opened the door, his father wasn’t there.
Instead a box sat on the threshold.
Apollo leaned out, as if he’d catch a glimpse of his dream father, maybe farther down the hall. Nobody there. He looked back down at the box. Heavy cardboard, one word written on the lid in black marker.
Improbabilia.
Apollo went down on a knee. He picked up the box—it wasn’t heavy—and brought it inside with him. The contents of the box shifted and thumped. He sat on the carpet in the living room. He opened the lid.
“THAT WAS YOUR father’s box,” Lillian said.
Apollo didn’t notice the sun had set, didn’t hear his mother enter the apartment. It was only when she touched the back of his neck that he became aware of anything else at all.
She dropped her purse and crouched beside him. “Where did you find all this?” she asked.
“Someone left it at the door,” he said.
Apollo had spread the contents out on the living room carpet. A pair of movie ticket stubs, the headshot of some young white woman, the rental agreement to an apartment in Jackson Heights, the bill for an overnight stay at a hotel on Ninth Avenue, right near Times Square, a small stack of receipts for takeout food, a marriage certificate for Brian West and Lillian Kagwa, and one children’s book.
“What are you talking about?” Lillian whispered as she scanned the collection. “My God,” she said even more softly.
Apollo turned