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 together. The handwriting in the margins, two different styles, suggested husband and wife both spent time studying these tomes, exchanging marginalia, an ongoing conversation that spanned decades. Apollo suddenly understood all these books as more than just an excellent payday. They were the evidence of two lives intertwined.
At three in the morning, in his one-bedroom apartment, surrounded by a small library of occult texts, Apollo Kagwa, thirty-four years old, realized his biological clock had gone off.
APOLLO HIT LIBRARY sales less regularly than estate sales, or used bookstores, but he’d been in Washington Heights anyway—for a fruitless estate sale—so he stopped at the Fort Washington branch of the NYPL.
Library sales were usually a mix of old books the branch hoped to sell off rather than recycle and books that locals had donated. You weren’t going to find something like the D’Agostino haul at a library, but you could buy a book for fifty cents, then sell it for five dollars. Almost any small business succeeded or failed by such margins. It wasn’t romantic, but reality rarely is. Apollo tended to come to library sales for things like large print editions of crime novels, the kind of stuff he sold to retirees who’d found his website and wanted the stuff shipped. Selling those books reminded him of his first business model—People magazine to Mrs. Ortiz in apartment C23.
The Fort Washington branch stood three stories tall, but the sale was being held in the basement, in a nook off the reading room. One of the librarians had to cover both the sale and her desk. Apollo reached the basement to find her helping a mother with two kids pick through shelves of well-worn picture books. The younger kid had taken on the vital task of pulling every third book to the floor. The mother didn’t seem to notice, or had decided not to notice, so the librarian now had a third job—cleanup crew. Then, from the reading room, a man’s voice called out loudly. Because the space had been so quiet, it sounded as if he was using a megaphone.
“Hello! Hello! I am in distress!”
The librarian shuttled from the book sale back into the reading room, where an enormous man stood at her desk. He wore a bulky old backpack and carried crammed shopping bags in each hand. A one-man pack mule.
“This is dire!” he shouted. “I am in need of a toilet!”
The librarian made her way around the man, and his bags, to the other side of her desk. She stood narrow at the shoulders, fuller at the hips. The man had a good two feet on her. From a distance you’d have thought you were watching an ogre and an elf square off.
The other patrons, mostly elderly, looked up from their newspapers and magazines but seemed wary of doing more. Apollo moved closer, ten more steps, and he’d be there to help.
“Listen to my voice,” the librarian said to the big man. “Can you hear me?” The librarian smiled when she said this, but her volume and her posture suggested something more commanding.
“I got ears, don’t I?” He leaned forward, as if he was going to throw himself across the desk, right at her.
“Well you see, I have ears too,” she said, not stepping back. “So why are you yelling?”
The man wobbled, as if the bags in his hands had become heavier. Or maybe he just felt confused. A man that size isn’t used to being barked at. Least of all from a woman who stood only an inch or two taller than five feet.
The librarian opened a desk drawer and revealed a wooden two-foot ruler with a single key attached by a string at one end.
“I need a piece of ID before I give you the bathroom key,” she said.
The woman never dropped her smile, but by now everyone—even the big man—could tell this lady was no joke. Slim as a crowbar and just as solid. Maybe a woman that small had to learn how to assert herself early, a survival technique to keep from being overrun or ignored. It worked. Everyone in the basement had been spellbound.
“I don’t have ID,” he said, now sheepish.
The librarian used the ruler as a pointer. “Leave all your bags here with me. I know you’ll come back for them.”
Instead of setting the loads down, he clutched them close, a pair of oversize purses. “These contain secrets.”
She nodded, opened the drawer again, dropped the ruler inside, pushed the drawer closed, crossed her arms, craned her head back, and looked the man directly in the eye.
Apollo made it to a count of ten before the man set the bags down. He looked hypnotized. “The backpack too?” he asked.
“All the bags,” the librarian said.
At that moment, if she’d gestured to Apollo, he would’ve handed over his bag as well. The big man set the large pack down with the others, and the librarian opened the drawer, handed him the key.
“Thank you,” he said softly.
“My pleasure,” she said, smiling warmly this time.
The whole reading room waited in silence, listening for the key fumbling in the lock, the squeak as the wooden bathroom door opened. When it slammed shut, everyone in the reading room shuddered as if they were waking up from a dream. All except the librarian, who’d already come around the desk, moved past Apollo, and returned to the mother with two kids. They bought four books for a dollar.
The librarian then turned to Apollo, who’d been standing there dumbstruck.
“Do you need something?” she asked.
Apollo pointed toward the man’s bags, gathered by her desk. “I was going to help you with that guy.”
The librarian looked at the bags, then back to Apollo.
“But you handled it yourself,” he said.
“That’s my job,” she said.
He asked her to dinner, and as she rang up his three books, she politely declined. The library sales in the basement nook were held every Friday, so Apollo returned the week after, and the week after that. Eventually she told him her name. Emma Valentine.
Five months after they met, she finally agreed to go out on a date.
TRYING TO IMPRESS, Apollo took Emma to a tiny sushi place on Thompson Street, where they had to wait outside on a line. The season—late fall—made waiting on the sidewalk feel like standing inside a fridge, so they were shivering by the time they got seated. They downed a bottle of hot sake before any food came.
He learned she’d been raised in Virginia, a tiny town called Boones Mill. She had a sister, Kim, eleven years older. Her parents had died when she was o
nly five, but she wouldn’t say any more about it than that.
Kim became Emma’s legal guardian when she turned eighteen, got work locally, and raised her sister instead of going to Jefferson College of Health Sciences in Roanoke, where she’d been accepted. It wasn’t until Emma graduated high school—and matriculated at UVA—that Kim finally went to Jefferson, for nursing. Emma remembered her life after her parents died as time spent in only three places: home, school, and the South County Library, twenty minutes away in Roanoke.
“My favorite librarian there was a woman named Ms. Rook,” Emma said. “She helped raise me almost as much as Kim.”
They were halfway through dinner, onto their second bottle of hot sake, and leaning toward each other across the small wooden tabletop. The customers crowded close all around, and the waiters had so little room to move that Apollo got bumped every time they passed by, but he hardly noticed. He only listened to her.
“Ms. Rook used to sit me down with a movie if Kim was late coming for me. That way she could start closing up. I watched everything they had for kids. Then one day, when I was twelve, I picked up something almost at random. I just liked the picture on the front. A couple of black people half naked and carrying spears.”
“That made you want to watch it?” Apollo asked.
“It was the only movie in the entire library that had black people on the cover. Of course I wanted to watch it! The movie was called Quilombo. A Brazilian film. Ms. Rook even came to check on me. She saw the movie playing, saw that I was occupied, and went on her way.”
Emma had become tipsy by then, laughing loudly.
“There’s no way Ms. Rook could’ve known it was a movie about the slave uprisings in Brazil. Or that the movie would show tons of Portuguese people getting killed by those slaves! She was such a sweet lady, I never told her what the movie was about. I knew she’d be mortified, and I was too polite to say anything. But I really liked it. It became the only thing I wanted to see.”
Here Emma tilted her head to the side and watched the ceiling, grinning.
“It was in Portuguese with English subtitles. I loved the way the language sounded. It took awhile, but I got Ms. Rook to order a few more Brazilian movies after that. Bye Bye Brasil, Subway to the Stars, Os Trapalhões e o Rei do Futebol. Finally, Ms. Rook had to stop buying them because one girl’s love of Brazil wasn’t enough to justify the costs of the tapes. But she’d done enough for me. I realized how big the world was. Bigger than Boones Mill. And I wanted to see it.”
“One of your eyes is bigger than the other,” Apollo said. He’d only just noticed it. The difference was hardly noticeable, but it made her seem to be peering at the world more deeply than most. Or maybe Apollo was just falling for her.
Emma lowered her head and covered the larger eye. Maybe she’d taken his observation as an insult. He doubted he could say anything to make it better now, so instead he said the first thing on his mind.
“I never cared if I had a boy or a girl, you know? I just want to be a good father to whatever kids I have.”
Even as he said it, he understood how nutty that sounded. Great topic of first date conversation, Apollo! Why not ask if she’d like to sign a thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage with you, too?
Emma lowered her hand and poured herself a little more sake. She drank it in a slow sip, set down the cup, then spoke. “I want to explain why I said no when you asked me out that first time.”
“And the next five times,” Apollo added.
“And the next five times,” Emma agreed.
Now Emma sat back in her chair while Apollo hunched forward.
“I said no because I’m moving to Brazil. Already bought my tickets. I’m going to Salvador do Bahia, in the north.”
“For how long?” Apollo asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Apollo drank straight from the ceramic sake bottle to finish off the booze.
“Then why did you say yes to me now?” he asked.
She looked at the table and grinned. “I found myself looking forward to Friday sales because I hoped you’d be back.” She raised her eyes to meet his. “I missed you.”
As he led her back out onto the street, he took her hand. She squeezed it tightly when he did.
“Now about this trip to Brazil,” Apollo said.
I am the god, Apollo, he told himself. I am the god, Apollo.
“Are you sure I can’t convince you to stay?”
Emma Valentine smiled at him crookedly, intoxicated as they kissed.
Four weeks later she left for Brazil.
TRY DATING OTHER women after a night like that. Apollo certainly did. But his heart wouldn’t buy it. It was Emma Valentine or bust. How long could she stay in Brazil, anyway? They wrote each other, but Emma couldn’t rely on an Internet connection. She left Salvador after a few months and moved to Manaus, then Fortaleza. Eventually she’d hit Rio and São Paulo, but not yet. Apollo found himself reading news from Brazil online. He got a DVD of Quilombo, and though the movie was serious business—African slaves battling the vicious Portuguese—he laughed when he imagined a twelve-year-old Emma watching it again and again in a public library in Roanoke. In Emma’s absence, he only fell more in love with her.
Apollo sold off the entire D’Agostino library, piecemeal. He put the Crowley postcard up on his site, and fourteen hours later he had five bids, finally selling it for three thousand dollars. In late 2003, he helped Lillian put a down payment on a house, a neat single-family home out in Springfield Gardens, Queens. She refused his help until they sat down together and calculated how much she’d save if she could put 30 percent down on the house instead of 20. This kind of thing helped occupy Apollo’s time and mind. After a year Emma wrote to say she was coming back to the United States. Her flight wouldn’t arrive until late at night, she wrote, and he might not even be interested in seeing her anymore, but if he did want to see her, she’d love for his face to be the first one she found at arrivals.
The plane, meant to arrive at ten o’clock, got delayed twice. Apollo ended up spending the night at JFK. The families and friends in the arrivals area sat, slumped, shuffled, and shrugged, and some fought. The longer the delays, the more everyone settled in, Apollo among them. Sometime after midnight he slipped into sleep.
At intervals one delayed plane or another arrived, and its sluggish passengers appeared, greeted by similarly sluggish loved ones. The grand windows of the international arrivals terminal let in the dawn light when Emma’s plane finally landed.
Her hair had grown longer, curlier; the brown showed a faintly reddish tinge now. Her skin was darker, and her clothes bright, fabric thin, all wrong for the cool spring season. She hadn’t brought back her suitcase, only a backpack slung on one arm. She’d left with more and returned with less. She moved slowly, seeming weary but also unrushed, and she saw him before he saw her.
“You stayed?” she asked as he took her pack.
It might’ve been exhaustion, but her eyes grew wet and trembled.
“You stayed,” she said again, quietly.
They sat in the food court to enjoy the best Dunkin’ Donuts had to offer.
“Welcome to America,” Apollo said as they unwrapped their egg and cheese sandwiches. He lifted his. “I’ll take you somewhere nicer soon.”
She pulled the sleeves of her shirt up slightly. “Fique tranquilo,” she said. She smiled. “I won’t keep doing that.”
Apollo went to the counter for a knife because the sandwich hadn’t been cut all the way through. He watched Emma raise the sandwich to her mouth to eat. He stayed by the counter to marvel that she’d returned. Around her wrist she wore a thin red string. Why did the sight of it make him stiffen? It had a sentimental appearance, the kind of thing some beautiful Brazilian boy tied around an American woman’s wrist because he could afford nothing more. She’d been gone a year. Why couldn’t she have fallen in love with someone else? Maybe she’d come back with fewer belongings because she was pl
anning to return.
Thinking in this way, he came back to the table with a plastic knife and a belly full of anxiety. He pushed the egg and cheese sandwich around but had no appetite. Emma remained quiet as well, until she’d finished her whole meal. Then she raised her arm, the one with the red string, so he could see it clearly. The string had gone a bit stiff. It was dirty. It had been on her wrist a long time.
“When I got to Salvador, I stayed with a family in a neighborhood called Itapuã. There they have a lagoon called Lagoa do Abaete. You remember, at our dinner, you told me about the old married Satanists? I thought of you when I saw the lagoon because it’s supposed to be haunted. There was a washerwoman there who I came to know after my Portuguese got stronger. My host family tried to keep me away from the woman, they told me she was a witch, but I liked her. I wasn’t scared of her. She made me think of my mother, who she might be if she were still alive. Tough and funny, and she didn’t give a damn about other people’s opinion of her. I found myself sneaking out of their house just to sit by the lagoon with her while she did her washing. Before I left for Manaus, she told me to make three wishes for my life, and then after I did, she tied this string around my wrist.”
Emma turned her hand clockwise, then counterclockwise, watching the red fabric.
“I must let it come apart, she said, and when it fell off my wrist, those wishes would come true. I could not cut it off. Nao corta-la. I thought it was fun for a while, a little bit mystical, but this thing has been on my skin for more than six months! It looks ratty, but I want my wishes to come true. Don’t look at me like that! I guess I believe in magic.”
Apollo took her hand and pulled it toward him.
I am the god, Apollo, he thought. I am the god, Apollo.
The Changeling Page 3
