The Changeling. Victor LaValle
it in himself.
Improbabilia.
APOLLO KAGWA MIGHT’VE gone to college if it wasn’t for a man named Carlton Lake. Apollo was a senior at John Bowne High School, and based on his grades, he qualified as absolutely average. Bs and Cs straight down the report card. It had been that way since ninth grade. A surprise to some of his teachers since the kid could be counted on for brains and even study, but school wasn’t his true enthusiasm. All Apollo Kagwa cared about was his business.
By the age of seventeen, he’d turned Improbabilia into a thriving concern. The kid was known in Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx. Rare and used book dealers learned of him because he would call a shop cold and ask if he could stop by, a fellow dealer who happened to be near and wanted to make a courtesy visit. Sure, they’d say, baffled by the decorum. These guys weren’t generally known for their Emily Post. And soon enough some fifteen-year-old black kid clomps in, he’s got a pack on his back that would make a mule buckle, and he introduces himself as Apollo. The kid’s glasses are so large, they should have windshield wipers.
He enters their stores and tries selling off weathered issues of magazines like The Connoisseur and Highlights. The combination of entrepreneurial spirit and absolute naïveté was enough to make some of those old booksellers fall hard for that fifteen-year-old. Through them he got the education he craved. They taught him how to value a book, how to navigate estate sales, and the best spots to set up a table at antique shows.
Other booksellers were far less welcoming. When he shared his stock, trying to sell, they accused him of having stolen the merchandise. Maybe he’d broken into a storefront and looted whatever he could. A few stores—the higher-end spots in Manhattan—had buzzer entry at the doors. This was the era of Bernhard Goetz shooting black boys on the subway and many white folks in the city cheering him on. Every kid with excess melanin became a superpredator, even a black boy with glasses and a backpack full of books. He might be standing at the entrance for fifteen minutes while the clerks pretended not to notice him.
To make things worse, Apollo would find himself wondering if he actually was frightening, a monster, the kind that would drive his own father away. That conviction flared brightest at moments like this, when the world seemed to corroborate his monstrousness. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be consumed. To endure these humiliations, these supernovas of self-loathing, Apollo dreamed up a mantra—or maybe the words came to him from some old memory—one he’d repeat to himself while he stood there being judged. I am the god, Apollo. I am the god, Apollo. I am the god, Apollo. He’d chant it enough that he soon felt downright divine. But that didn’t mean those store owners let him in.
In 1995, senior year of high school, he got accepted to Queens College, but the summer before school started, one of the dealers who mentored Apollo gave him his graduation gift, Confessions of a Literary Archaeologist by a man named Carlton Lake.
Lake gives a history of his life as a collector of rare and valuable books, manuscripts, music scores, and even letters from the era of Napoleon. While the collector, and his collection, apparently became quite famous, the early part of the book details how he came to love these materials. He’d been a big reader and browser of secondhand bookstores. When it came time to start truly collecting books, the kind that cost more than a couple of quarters, Lake mentions he was “abetted by an indulgent grandmother.” In other words, Grandma bankrolled him. And quickly enough Carlton Lake was collecting the great nineteenth-century French poets: Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé. Soon he had his moment of revelation, “illumination” he calls it, when he made his first great purchase at an auction in New York. He bought a copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal—Flowers of Evil—and inside found corrections written in the margins by Baudelaire himself. With this find, he became a literary archaeologist. For Lake this was the start of his true calling. He had become a book man.
By the time Apollo Kagwa finished reading that anecdote, he knew he wouldn’t be attending Queens College in the fall. Though he didn’t have a grandmother bankrolling his purchases, and despite the reality that he didn’t yet know the difference between Baudelaire and Beatrix Potter, he still felt sure he was also a book man. If Carlton Lake could do this shit why couldn’t he? The son of two fierce dreamers had become one, too.
“ESTATE SALE” sounds posh, but for Apollo it might mean traveling all the way to New Rochelle to inspect one garbage bag full of water-damaged books in the basement of some Victorian Colonial. Then again he might find four bookshelves of perfectly preserved first editions at a townhouse in Sugar Hill. The suspense, the surprise, mattered nearly as much as the profit.
Apollo had found his calling early, but his first great find in the field—his Baudelaire moment—didn’t happen till he was thirty-four. He’d moved out of Lillian’s apartment at nineteen and found a studio in Jackson Heights, the place so crammed with books he hardly had room for a twin bed. He crossed the country on his book hunts. Occasionally he looked up from the frontispieces and margins to take in the sights, date a woman, but after a few good moments he always got back to work.
The big day, though, was at an estate sale in the basement of a Bronx apartment building, forty-two containers of books—from sneaker boxes to an old orange milk crate scavenged from a supermarket. In them were some of the rarest books on magic and the occult that Apollo had ever seen. A loving couple, Mr. and Mrs. D’Agostino, died within months of each other and left behind a collection that creeped out their four children and eleven grandchildren. He found a snapshot of the old duo tucked in the pages of a grimoire. They looked like the old man and wife from that movie Up, but this version of Carl and Ellie Fredrickson had been stockpiling volumes of sorcery. The homely photo and the otherworldly collection were so incongruous, Apollo had to fight hard not to laugh in front of the family.
He made a lowball offer right there, and because he’d been the first dealer willing to come out to the South Bronx, he got the sale. He rented a van that afternoon and took the stuff home. It took a week to catalog everything and upload the relevant info for the books. As he leafed through them, he found scribbled notes here and there in the margins, in two different kinds of handwriting.
As he examined a third edition folio of a lighthearted little book called Witch Hunter Manual of the Blood Council, out slipped a postcard addressed to the D’Agostinos. The plain postcard hadn’t yellowed as much as he would’ve expected since the date stamped on it read 1945. The addresser’s name, his signature absolutely clear, was Aleister Crowley. A quick check online verified Crowley had been a famed occultist in the early 1900s, called “the wickedest man in history.” Accused of Satanism. A recreational drug user and sexual adventurer back when such a thing was scandalous rather than just a part of one’s online dating profile. Ozzy Osbourne wrote a song about the guy in 1981. And apparently Domenico and Eliana D’Agostino had received a postcard from him. Apollo read Aleister Crowley’s note to the couple.
Some men are born sodomites, some achieve sodomy, and some have sodomy thrust upon them.
Thinking of you both.
Well, how did you like that? The D’Agostinos had been certified freaks!
Even before the postcard this haul had been Apollo’s best. Now, if he could authenticate the card, this find could become legendary. Carlton Lake got Baudelaire’s corrected texts; Apollo Kagwa got a horny postcard from Aleister Crowley. He read the card again and laughed. He held it up to share the joke with someone else—but he sat alone in the living room. The find of his life, and no one there to share the news. Now he felt surprised, overcome, with a different emotion.
Apollo Kagwa felt fucking lonely.
He looked again at the books he’d bought from the family; he scanned the postcard. Mr. and Mrs. D’Agostino had been up to some wild stuff, it seemed, but the two of them had been on their occult adventure