The Changeling

by Victor Lavalle

  “Merchants were making money, and they wanted to live better than the lower classes did. This meant there were new rules about how to behave, both for the adults and for the kids. Fairy tales changed accordingly. Now they had to have a moral, something to train those children in the new rules. Which is when they started turning to shit. A bad fairy tale has some simple goddamn moral. A great fairy tale tells the truth.”

  Cal picked up a bag of socks and held it out to Apollo. She pointed to the sock puppets she’d been wearing when he arrived. “One of those was going to be the enchantress, but I can’t make her scary enough. You give it a try.”

  He pulled out a gray sock. “Are you going to tell me about my wife? Is Emma here?”

  To this there was no answer. It was as if he hadn’t spoken at all.

  “Your guards tried to kill me,” he said as he laid the sock flat on the table.

  Cal followed Apollo’s example and took out a gray sock of her own. “Years ago one husband found us,” she said. “This is long before we moved to this island. He brought two guns with him and so much rage. I made the mistake of trying to talk with him, to make him see, but it didn’t work. He did a lot of damage. He killed three women and seven kids. Shot me twice but I came through. Since then I decided we had to protect ourselves. We left the world and came to this island. We armed ourselves the best we could. And if men showed up, we were more…proactive.”

  Apollo slipped the sock onto his right hand, then brought his thumb and fingers together until he saw the semblance of a face, his knuckles the top of a ridged skull.

  “Exactly how many men have you killed here?” Apollo said.

  “We’re like the police,” Cal said. “We don’t track those numbers.”

  She walked around Apollo and plugged the glue gun into an extension cord that ran across the room and into the generator. Already he’d become used to the faint chug of the machine. When she plugged in the glue gun, the generator chugged slightly louder. She handed the glue gun to him.

  “Can I get some of those cotton balls over there?” Apollo asked. He spoke to Cal but looked at the dark corners where the guards stood.

  She picked up a stick of glue and tapped him gently on the nose. “That’s the spirit.”

  Standing here, Apollo could look at the desk where the big word processor sat and beside that a small jumble of papers. They were children’s drawings. The picture on top was of a tall, craggy mountain and at the bottom of the mountain a deep, black cave. Inside the cave two yellow eyes floated. He thought he saw the faint outline of an open mouth below the eyes. He felt mesmerized by the picture.

  “Cotton balls,” Cal said, pulling him from his trance, dropping a handful into his palm. “Will your enchantress have gray hair?”

  She held up the glue gun and pulled its trigger gently until a teardrop of glue appeared. Apollo looked down at the cotton balls. For a moment, it seemed as if he held a cloud in one hand.

  “How do we protect our children?” Cal said quietly.

  Apollo watched the soft little shape in his palm. “Obviously I don’t know.”

  “No,” Cal said. “That’s what Rapunzel is about. That’s the question it’s asking.”

  She brought the glue gun to the sock on her hand and dabbed twice. Then she affixed two googly eyes. She opened her hand flat inside the sock and squeezed out a few circles of glue. She pressed an oval of red felt to the spot, then brought her hand closed again so the red felt became the inside of a mouth.

  “The old man and woman have the child,” Cal said. “But they do nothing to protect it. They’re completely hands off, and the baby gets snatched away.”

  Quickly, expertly, Cal took some green string from a pile and glued it to the top of the sock, locks of mossy-looking hair. She found small, precut bits of black felt and affixed them above the googly eyes. Eyebrows. Two small pieces of brown felt became ears.

  “The enchantress hides the girl away in a tower. She won’t let the child do anything in the world without her. She’s a helicopter parent.”

  Two longer pieces of brown felt turned into a pair of arms.

  “But the prince still finds a way inside, doesn’t he? No matter what we do, the world finds its way in. So then how do we protect our children? Hundreds of years ago German peasants were asking one another this question. But rather than frame it as a question they turned it into a story that embodied the concern. How do we protect our children? It’s 2015, and we’re still trying to find an answer. The new fears are the old fears, and the old fears are ancient.”

  She held up the finished puppet.

  “Now I know this isn’t frightening,” Cal said, grinning. “But when I do the show tomorrow night, the children will talk to this puppet as if she were as real as me. Actually, they’ll think of this puppet as more real than me.”

  She held the puppet up close to Apollo’s face until her own lost focus and disappeared. She didn’t move her hand to pretend the puppet was speaking, and she used her normal speaking voice. She just let it hover there before him, and the longer he looked at it, the more it came to life.

  “The Scottish called it glamer,” Cal said. “Glamour. It’s an old kind of magic. An illusion to make something appear different than it really is. A monster might look like a beautiful maiden. A ruined castle appears to be a golden palace. A baby is…” Her voice drifted off.

  Apollo found himself speaking to the puppet just as Cal said the children would. “Not a baby,” he whispered.

  “What a smart boy,” the puppet said.

  “But this isn’t a fairy tale,” Apollo answered.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Best way to clear the air is to have it all out in the open!” A man’s voice. Outside. In the courtyard.

  Cal’s fingers closed into a fist, and the puppet lost all animation. The mouth shut, and the eyes curled over—it was like watching a soul slip out of a body. Cal dropped the hand, and Apollo watched the guards move quickly to the two windows and look down.

  One of them said, “Another man.”

  Cal looked back at Apollo with such fury, he thought she’d order the guards to tear his skull open right there.

  “You didn’t come alone,” she hissed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Apollo wanted to explain. He’d completely forgotten about William from the moment he’d stepped into this room.

  “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view,” William Wheeler shouted in the courtyard. He sounded giddy. Or insane. “Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it!”

  “Seclusion rooms,” Cal ordered. “Both of them.”

  THE SECLUSION ROOMS were located in the Tuberculosis Pavilion. It was the largest, best-equipped building in the complex, four stories of red brick with enough bed space, in its prime, for three hundred patients. It was the one structure Cal declared out of bounds for the members of her community. The women had even designed makeshift barriers to keep the kids out, stacks of tattered furniture and rubble that would be tough for most young children to scale. The only area of the building ever put to use were these seclusion rooms, a makeshift prison.

  Cal and her guards walked Apollo and William to the pavilion. While one twin pried away the boards tacked over the doorway, the other stood behind the prisoners, mace at the ready. This one held up William’s phone.

  “What was he doing when they found him?” Cal asked.

  The pop of wooden boards sounded like gunshots.

  “He was on the shoreline with the phone’s light on. Just standing there waving it over his head, side to side.”

  “Did he have a signal?” Cal asked, taking the phone. “Could he make a call?”

  “No,” the guard said. “He was just waving the thing.”

  Apollo tried to catch William’s eye, but it wasn’t working. William looked at the night sky as if he was out strolling. He smiled faintly. If not for the location, you’d have thought he was a
middle-aged man stargazing in his backyard.

  Cal growled her next question. “Why the fuck haven’t you destroyed this yet?”

  “Thought you should see what else he has on the phone.”

  The last of the boards were freed from the entry door, and the other guard opened it. Apollo couldn’t get any sense of the depth of the hallway or its width, the height of the ceiling. So dark inside, there might’ve been no floor beyond the threshold, just a bottomless pit.

  “Oh God,” Cal said quietly as she scrolled through the phone. “This is Gretta’s husband?”

  The guard behind Apollo pushed him forward, toward the shadowed hallway. Before he took a step, Cal smashed the phone into the back of William’s head. He stumbled forward but didn’t fall, so she hit him again. He barked, a real animal noise, but still he didn’t go down. One of the twins kicked the backs of William’s legs. He yelped and went to his hands and knees. His glasses flew off, and he scurried after them instantly, automatically. Cal brought the phone down five more times on William’s back. William lay in the dirt, huffing. She dropped the phone on the ground right near William’s head, and the guard who kicked him brought the mace down four times. It crunched and cracked. It died.

  “We should tell her he’s here,” Cal said. “She’d want to be here when we kill him.”

  “You have her phone number?” William asked. “Can you share it with me?”

  The guards kicked at him until he went flat in the dirt.

  Now Apollo was pushed forward. He entered the dark doorway cautiously. Apollo heard William groaning. He must’ve been trying to rise. He spat and coughed. Eventually the twins had to drag him in.

  —

  The seclusion rooms were essentially mesh cages. There was a dead bolt to lock patients in. All this had been put in place back when it was an infectious disease hospital, and it was kept that way for the years when this place serviced juvenile addicts. Now Apollo and William were in them. Two cages, side by side. They could see each other, talk with each other, though the mesh was too tightly woven for them to reach through.

  “At least I got my glasses back,” William said as he sat with his back to the cage door.

  There were window frames in each room, the windows smashed out long ago. Mesh wiring lay across the frames, so escape was impossible, but moonlight entered and gave each cage a blue tint.

  “They knew who you were,” Apollo said. “Cal said your wife’s name. You kept a few things from me.” He stood at the window, looking outside.

  “Well obviously,” William said. He turned his glasses around as if he could catch his reflection in them. He smiled as if he was checking his teeth for stains. Then he slipped them on and looked at Apollo.

  “They beat the shit out of me!” Apollo shouted. His thighs still hurt, his lower back, too.

  “I’m sorry for that,” William said. “Really. If I’m honest, I didn’t think we’d make it this far. I’ve been going up and down the East River for months. Been on every island looking for Cal, but somehow I kept missing this place. Then you spotted it the first time through.”

  You don’t see, but you will.

  Apollo heard Emma’s voice—the last words she ever spoke to him—and he shivered. He tugged at the red string on his middle finger. The knot held. Apollo looked up, slightly confused, overwhelmed, trying to make sense of so many things.

  “If you’ve been going up and down this river for months, then you didn’t learn how to drive a boat today,” Apollo said.

  “My father had me out on boats since I was a baby. We’re Norwegians originally. Sailing is in our blood.”

  “But what’s the point of all this?” Apollo said. “Why keep it from me?”

  “Trust takes time. But I didn’t pick your name out of a hat. I confess, I knew who you were.”

  “From the news,” Apollo said, feeling so naïve for having ever believed otherwise.

  “Not the news about what Emma did. I knew who you were long before that. I read about your wife giving birth on the A train.”

  “We never spoke to the press about that,” Apollo said.

  “You didn’t,” William agreed. “But the press covered it. Emma was brought to Harlem Hospital. They issued a birth certificate. You remember what I told you before I gave you that video of Emma? A person who has a computer connection and who really cares can dig up nearly anything.”

  Apollo kicked at the mesh wall between his cage and William’s. “But why? Why do all that? I was just living my life, and you’re in your house looking through some stranger’s personal business?”

  William walked closer to Apollo and patted the mesh wall gently. “Gretta had just left me. They were gone, and my home was empty. I was in a free fall. I wasn’t thinking straight. I read about the stuff on the A train, and I just had so much time all of a sudden. And as good as I was at finding information, I couldn’t find a damn thing out about Gretta. It was like she’d disappeared. And she had. She’d come here to be with Cal. I didn’t know it then, though. So I had all this time, and I read your A-train story, and a mix of boredom and curiosity and just plain going nuts sent me down this path.

  “I found Emma’s name, but I also found out yours. I learned about your business. I found you on Facebook. And there’s all these pictures of your son. Ten pictures in a post! Twelve. Half of them are too blurry to see straight, but it didn’t matter. You were so happy. You were so proud. And I understood that. I felt like…this is a guy who knows how good it can be! Loving someone so damn much. Me and this guy, we’re the same. He gets why family is important. But really all this came about because Gretta ran off with my daughter and destroyed my family. If that hadn’t happened, we never would’ve met.”

  “Daughters,” Apollo said. “You told me you had two. Was that a lie too?”

  “No,” William said. For the first time, his voice softened. “I had two.”

  Because of the moonlight, Apollo could see his face. William wept.

  Apollo stood in place. His brain felt as if it had short-circuited. He had the instinct to console this man, yet he’d lied about so much. Still, he felt one thing to be completely true: this man had lost his family, and it had driven him a little insane. Apollo could identify with that much.

  William slapped the mesh wall, and Apollo jumped back.

  “I called in the cavalry,” William said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t try to help you, but that’s what I was doing while they had you.”

  “What does that mean?” Apollo asked. “The police? The FBI?”

  William ignored the question, offering something more relevant instead. “Now I’m going to pull back the very last veil, Apollo. I’m going to put every card I have face up on the table. Emma is alive. We know this. You want to find her. Cal—all these women here—they are not going to help you find her. No matter what they say, they only protect their own. But I could help you find Emma. I would travel to the ends of the earth with you.”

  “But…” Apollo said.

  “But you have to help me get Gretta and Grace back first. You help me, and then I will help you, and I can be very resourceful, as you’ve learned.”

  Apollo walked closer to the window and looked out at the night sky, up at the nearly full moon as if preparing to make a wish. “What are you asking me to do?”

  “Just talk to Gretta for me,” William said. “They’re not going to let me see her. Not while I’m still in a state to talk. But she doesn’t know you. You could explain how far I’ve come. You could tell her I know it wasn’t her fault. That she and I both lost our minds after Agnes died. That was our baby. I haven’t said her name out loud in almost a year. Agnes. My sweet girl.

  “I understand now that it wasn’t Gretta’s fault though. I want to beg for her forgiveness for all the ways I was short-tempered and quick to accuse. I want to offer her my forgiveness, if she wants it. I want her and Grace to come back home. I want my family, what’s left of my family, to be whole again. I’m asking
you to tell her all that.”

  “How do you know I’ll even see her? They might come in and just shoot us both.”

  “You heard her. She’ll call Gretta. If Gretta knows I’m here, she’ll come. Maybe she really does want to see me dead, but I don’t think it’s that simple. It never is between people. If they take you elsewhere and you see Gretta, you tell her what I said. If Gretta forgave me, then maybe they’d let me go. I don’t know, but it’s the only chance I have left. You are the only chance I have left. I don’t want to die without trying.”

  Apollo turned from the moon to look at William in the other cage. “What if I say no?”

  William coughed until he choked. Eventually he recovered. “Man to man, if you don’t help me, everyone is going to die on this island. Even me.”

  “Who’s coming here?” Apollo asked.

  “I won’t call it off,” William said. “I won’t even try.”

  With that William walked into the far corner of his cage, where the moonlight didn’t reach. He lay on the ground in darkness, rolled his coat into a pillow, and bedded down for the night.

  Apollo never fell asleep.

  CAL ARRIVED JUST after dawn with her twin guards. The twins looked as tired as Apollo felt—their eyes red as cinnamon hearts—but their posture remained rigid as a pair of hunting rifles. Cal opened the door of Apollo’s seclusion room, and William sat up to watch. He slipped on his glasses as if, without them, he’d be underdressed.

  Cal stepped into Apollo’s cage. She wore the same clothes as the night before. Her gray sweater looked as if she’d slept in it. The hem of it showed traces of dirt and leaves.

  “Good morning, Pearl,” William said.

  For the first time since Apollo met her, she looked startled.

  “Pearl Walker,” he said. “Raised off the coast of Maine. In trouble with the law for habitual shoplifting. A heavy drinker. Mother of one. Do you remember the name of your high school? Because I could tell you.”

  Cal pulled her gray sweater tighter to herself and looked down at the floor and breathed deeply. When she lifted her head, her cool had returned.