The Changeling

by Victor Lavalle

  Quickly there was some distance between Apollo and the island. The splash of the East River against his creek boat became louder.

  Apollo was beginning to understand just how far he’d have to paddle—at night, in the cold—before he reached the far shore of the Bronx. He didn’t look back at the island. When he paddled, he tried, as best he could, to stay quiet. Why? Cal’s words came back to him.

  The big one can swim.

  “I am the god, Apollo,” he whispered, trying to focus in this tornado of madness.

  He kept on, and once North Brother Island disappeared behind him, there was only the distant shore to focus on. He picked a cluster of apartment buildings as his guiding light. He used the projects to lead him back to land.

  “I am the god, Apollo.”

  After fifteen minutes he felt so tired that few thoughts remained, only the mechanical practice of the paddle rising and falling. He doubted he’d be able to last at this without some help, but what help could he hope for out here on the water?

  Another twenty minutes, and he despaired. The Bronx seemed no closer. Still he kept on. “I am…”

  He couldn’t finish the sentence.

  The shore finally became visible; it was the edge of Barretto Point Park. You have to go to your son’s grave. You have to see it for yourself so you have no doubts. Apollo finally felt ready to know who was buried at Nassau Knolls Cemetery in Port Washington, New York.

  HOW FAST WOULD a Honda Odyssey need to be traveling in order to smash through wrought-iron cemetery gates?

  Apollo Kagwa tried to do the math. He’d abandoned the creek boat at the edge of Barretto Point Park and ambled to the closest subway station, East 149th Street on the 6 line. He descended the stairs in wet jeans and boots, dog tired and half crazed with otherworldly knowledge, and even the homeless man squatting in the station looked at him with mistrust and worry. When he reached the turnstile, he reached for his wallet so he could swipe his MetroCard—a habit so ingrained that even now he couldn’t stop himself—and this was when he remembered it had been lost in the waters of North Brother Island when he’d almost been drowned. Since he’d survived, maybe it was more like a baptism. Reborn now as what? Apollo hopped the turnstile, then waited on the downtown 6 calculating the amount of force required to ram a car through Nassau Knolls Cemetery’s gates. He assumed he’d be going in during the night. It was doubtful they’d just let you dig up a grave while the sun was up.

  But by the time he got home, it was early morning. A Wednesday. Thousands of people off to work. As New Yorkers do, they studiously avoided looking at Apollo even as they paid him their full attention. If he acted crazy and dangerous, they might switch cars, but if he only looked crazy and dangerous, they’d tolerate him. He stood the whole time because he felt he’d pass out if he sat. He reached the apartment and let himself in, took off his clothes, and it was as if he’d taken off an exoskeleton or a cast. Without the clothes his body melted. He hardly made it to the bedroom before he passed out. And when he woke, it was evening.

  He felt no better rested, but he could sit up, stand up, and almost in passing he forced himself to eat. He dressed and went on the computer to reserve a Zipcar. When he discovered the Honda Odyssey was available—Suave, the same one he’d driven when he and Brian found the first edition in Riverdale—it felt like fate.

  Apollo drove from Manhattan into Queens and from Queens out to Plainview, Long Island. Nassau Knolls Cemetery. Concentrate on that. He’d never been good at math, but he thought that fifty miles an hour in a 4,400-pound vehicle would tear a pair of iron gates apart.

  THE FRONT ENTRANCE to Nassau Knolls Cemetery sits on Port Washington Boulevard, and while the grounds are enormous, what surrounds those grounds is still a residential neighborhood. Even more to the point, the Port Washington police department sits literally right next door to the cemetery and the Port Washington fire department is across the street. And yet Apollo Kagwa noticed none of this as he burned down Port Washington Boulevard, approaching ramming speed.

  He slowed down, a bit, only when he calculated that he couldn’t drive straight into the gates from Port Washington Boulevard. So he made a right on Revere Road, then turned the Odyssey around in the parking lot of a pharmacy. Now, moving west on Revere, he pressed his foot onto the gas pedal. It was eleven o’clock on a Thursday night, and the roads were empty in that baffling suburban way. He zoomed down Revere Road in an almost meditative silence. He crossed Port Washington Boulevard doing thirty-five miles an hour.

  Then Patrice Green stamped his size-fifteen foot on the brakes, and the Odyssey spun out in a half circle, and the howl of the tires seemed loud enough to rouse the living and the dead. Apollo levitated in his seat. The seatbelt slapped him back down. His head spun a moment longer than the car. He bit his tongue and let go of the wheel.

  “That was your plan?” Patrice asked Apollo from the passenger seat. “You’re just going to bust through the gates with the police department right up the road?”

  Apollo’s foot had come off the gas. He looked down at it as if it had betrayed him. Patrice’s big old hoof remained steady on the brake. Apollo looked back at Patrice with a catatonic air. He’d picked up the big man because he needed Patrice’s help—digging up a grave would be exhausting work. But he hadn’t said a thing about the tribute page. Patrice still believed Apollo didn’t know who’d started the damn thing. But Apollo had a hard time playacting, kept wanting to haul off and crack his former friend in the teeth.

  “I’d suggest we drive back to the parking lot and turn off the car,” Patrice said.

  Apollo watched Patrice for a long second.

  “You hear me in there?” Patrice punched Apollo, not lightly. “I told you I’d help you,” he said as calmly as he could. “You came to my place, told me and Dana a lot of shit that didn’t make any fucking sense, but it didn’t matter. We’re your friends, do or die.”

  “Friends,” Apollo repeated.

  “Plus Dana was heated this guy took us for all that money,” Patrice said. “We thought we could put a down payment on a place! But we’re not going to spend money this motherfucker stole from his dead wife.” Patrice rubbed the top of his head softly. “I admit I was still kind of impressed with what he pulled off. High technical skill. No question. A worthy foe.”

  Patrice slipped the car into park, took his foot off the brake, opened the iPad case sitting in his lap, and turned the tablet on. “Right now though you and me are two black men sitting in a minivan in the middle of the road in the middle of White Ass, Long Island, and that’s bound to draw attention soon enough. I told you I’d help you, so let me help. Cool?”

  “Yeah,” Apollo said. “You’re my friend after all.”

  Patrice watched Apollo thoughtfully for a few seconds. “Yeah. First thing we need to do is back up. Put the car in reverse.”

  Apollo nodded. He might as well have been a robot working under voice commands. Now the car coasted backward slowly.

  “You’ll have to steer this thing,” Patrice said, looking out the back. “ ’Cause right now you’re about to go up on the sidewalk.”

  Apollo looked into the rearview mirror, then the passenger mirror, then finally turned the wheel. He parked in a spot behind the pharmacy on the corner. When Patrice demanded the car keys, Apollo handed them over.

  “You know, if me and Dana had kids like you once suggested, I couldn’t be out here helping you right now.” He grinned. “Now thank your child-free friend.”

  “Thank you,” Apollo said stiffly.

  “You’re welcome.”

  THEY SAT IN the dark inside the Honda Odyssey and listened for police sirens that never came. They did hear one car cruising down Port Washington Boulevard but dismissed it, someone on their way home, that’s all. But then, after a minute of silence, the same car, at least it sounded like the same car, prowled past in the other direction. Its engine had a grim, grumbling quality to it, a powerful engine, barely restrained. The pharmac
y blocked their view, so they couldn’t see the vehicle. Was it some random car or a police cruiser? Neither of them was going to walk out to the corner to check. They were like two fish taking shelter in a cove because a shark might be in the open water.

  Patrice’s iPad had gone off so he turned it on again. The lock screen showed Patrice and Dana on their wedding day. Bride and groom, in tuxedo and gown, stood below an indoor basketball hoop.

  “You two got married on the court?”

  “We made it work,” Patrice said, looking down at the image, his face lit up by the LED screen and the memory. After a moment he swiped right, and the homescreen appeared, a familiar grid of apps. He swiped from one screen to the next.

  Apollo and Patrice heard the same car for the third time, prowling Port Washington Boulevard. Apollo rolled his window down, leaned out, and this time saw the faint glow of the car’s headlights as they lit up a storefront on the opposite corner. They paused there, as if the driver of the car were idling in the street. That vehicle sat on the other side of this pharmacy, and its engine grumbled and its lights played in the darkness. To Apollo’s ear, it sounded—almost, nearly—like whatever he’d heard on the island that night. Whatever had been lurking in the copse of trees.

  With his head out the window, he looked up at the sky as if some great object might be coming down on their car right now, flung by something impossibly strong. But the only thing visible in the sky was the moon and a sprinkle of stars. And then the car—who drove it?—trundled on again. Maybe it had just been waiting at a red light. Apollo didn’t roll the window up again until the guttering of the engine passed on.

  When Apollo pulled his head back in, Patrice had the Google Maps app working.

  “Nassau Knolls Cemetery is almost four hundred acres,” Patrice said. “Three million people buried here. It’s big enough that there’s got to be some part of the fencing that’s easy to slip through.”

  Patrice had become so occupied with his Google Map, he didn’t realize Apollo had swiped back his keys until they were in the ignition and the engine turned on. The Odyssey roared even as it sat in park.

  “We can just drive around the perimeter,” Apollo said. “You don’t need to rely on computers for everything.”

  Patrice reached over and turned the car off. He spoke to Apollo with aggravated patience. “The two of us are not driving around slow in a suburban neighborhood at midnight. Somebody’s going to call the cops on some shit like that. And I did not survive Iraq to get shot to death by some Suffolk County cop who ‘feared for his life.’ You feel me?”

  Patrice watched Apollo now.

  “Then let’s get out and walk,” Apollo said.

  Patrice nodded. “Two black men walking through white suburbs at night. Never heard of that going bad.”

  Apollo gave an exasperated laugh.

  “ ‘We can be heroes,’ ” Patrice said. “But heroes like us don’t get to make mistakes.”

  Patrice typed in “Nassau Knolls Cemetery.”

  “Street view,” Patrice said, licking his lips as if he’d been given a salty treat.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” Patrice finally said.

  He lifted the screen for Apollo to see. The image captured on a sunny afternoon. A portion of the cemetery fencing looked as if it had been torn open, a gap wide enough to fit a truck through.

  “Something big did that,” Apollo said softly.

  “Maybe a truck or a car?” Patrice said, closing the iPad. “Big accident?”

  “Maybe.”

  Apollo leaned out the window to listen for the prowl car. How long did he wait? He couldn’t quite say. Too long, probably. Which is when he realized there might be another reason he wasn’t gunning the Honda.

  There are some things people aren’t meant to see. Even with all he’d experienced on the island, Apollo understood that whatever lay buried in that grave existed as the farthest landmark on this new map of the spectral territories. Ultima Thule of grief. Would he go insane if he opened that casket? Would he burst into flames? Turn to stone? Despite all this, he finally turned the key. He pulled the Honda out of the parking lot and drove down Revere Road, not going too fast or too slow, nothing to cause concern among the locals.

  In those old stories, the myths and fairy tales Cal had talked about, the heroes did what they did but you never knew why. In the stories, at least, they had no interior life. Their job was simply to act. Gods and gorgons allied against them, and still they bore the spear and shield. Still they walked into the deep, dark forests. But did those heroes ever feel like Apollo did now? The real people, not the characters they became. They were human beings too, after all. They must’ve shivered in the shadow of the world’s great horrors. They must have wondered how they would ever see the quest through. And somehow they persevered. Maybe that was the point of telling those stories again and again, one generation to the next.

  If they could be brave, then we might be, too.

  THE MODERN GRAVE is only four feet deep, not six. In the past bodies were buried six feet deep to compensate for their eventual decomposition and, sometime after that, the casket collapsing in on itself, leaving a sinkhole. But the modern casket is much thicker and sturdier, and many have steel reinforcement, so that it produces no sinkhole. As a secondary precaution, caskets are now buried inside concrete grave liners, like a casket for the casket. This concrete vault is the other reason that being buried four feet deep is fine in the modern day. Patrice explained this as they walked through the cemetery, a dash of research done on the quick, as the two men padded across the dirt in the dark.

  Patrice looked up the location of Brian Kagwa’s burial plot. Nassau Knolls was so large, they could’ve wandered for half a day without stumbling across it. But the cemetery’s website included a handy pdf.

  They used the community mausoleum—a white building that looked like a banquet hall—as a kind of North Star. Brian’s grave lay behind the building. There would be a road they could follow on the other side.

  They weren’t thirty yards into the graveyard before they heard the rumbling engine of the prowl car again. Both stopped moving and turned back toward the fence line. There were no trees here, but the moonlight was weak. They heard the car, it coasted, and soon its lights played through the fence posts like cards being run along the spokes of a bike tire. The light raked at the graveyard dirt. Apollo and Patrice didn’t dare even to crouch. The car reached the big break in the fence line, and there it stopped. Apollo saw the silhouette of the car but couldn’t be sure whether there were police lights on the roof. The car idled there, then they heard the mechanical hiss of a window sliding down. Could it be Kinder Garten at the wheel? How would he have known they were here?

  Another moment.

  Another moment.

  Then, achingly slowly, the car moved on.

  Once the red rear lights disappeared down the block, Patrice opened the iPad and scanned the map quickly. “The maintenance building is on the far end,” he said, pointing toward the mausoleum.

  The maintenance shed was a prefab beige metal building, two stories high and fifty feet long. As big as the mausoleum, but it had been tucked behind a line of trees so it disappeared in the night. Apollo was sure it was there only because of the bright yellow Caterpillar backhoe loader parked at the edge of the trees.

  “I could run that backhoe,” Patrice offered.

  Apollo kicked at one of the enormous tires. “That probably won’t make much noise at twelve-thirty at night.”

  Patrice simply blinked at him.

  “We need the old-fashioned tools,” Apollo said.

  They walked the perimeter of the building. It had a rectangular shape, and on one of the longer sides sat three sets of garage doors. Apollo went along trying to lift each one, but all were locked. At the last garage door, Apollo lost his shit for about ten seconds and rattled at the door handle as if he could shake it open.

  “There’s going to be an alarm system,
” Patrice warned.

  Apollo let go of the door handle and stared back at his friend. Patrice hadn’t been scolding him but was thinking out loud. Patrice moved along the side of the building, but he wasn’t bothering with the doors. Instead he scanned the upper corners of the building. He pointed to a corner where a gray box the size of a router had been affixed to the wall.

  “Now let’s say they’ve modernized this place in the last few years and someone convinced them to go from a wired alarm system to a wireless alarm system.”

  He flipped on the iPad and swiped through grid after grid of applications. He tapped an app and tapped twice more, then watched as a series of numbers appeared in a box toward the bottom of the screen.

  “This is some late-nineties technology they’re using. I kind of feel bad for them. They probably paid some dude more than they should have for some shit that stopped being effective fifteen years ago. They heard ‘wireless alarm system’ and just nodded and signed the check. Our money says, ‘In God We Trust,’ but technology is catching up.”

  He laughed at this quietly, a proud member of an upstart faith.

  “Now what we’re going to do is pretty simple. I’m going to use this app to send some radio noise back at the central control system. It’ll be like I’m playing my radio a lot louder than the alarm system’s radio. When we push open this door, that radio signal will die out, but my radio will be playing so loud that the system won’t be able to tell that its radio has gone quiet.”

  Patrice tapped once on his screen, and a small blue circle in the upper-right corner throbbed. He set the iPad face up on the ground. Then he threw his hip against the door, and after one pathetic squawk, the perimeter was breached. Sure enough, the night’s silence remained.

  Had there actually been a working alarm system at all? Apollo couldn’t say. But he skirted his way around the little tablet on the ground anyway just to be sure he wouldn’t interrupt its wizardry. He followed Patrice inside. The iPad stayed outside standing guard.