The Changeling

by Victor Lavalle

“You must approach her with caution,” the old man said as he set the timer on the counter. “There are ways such things must be done.” He pointed at the pot. “With an offering.”

  The old man walked to the fridge, opened it, and reached inside. He pulled out a bag of potatoes. He walked back to the counter and dropped them with a thump. He returned to the fridge once more and revealed a green bottle with no label.

  “That’s a strange wedding ring,” the old man said, pointing at Apollo’s left hand. “Is hers made of barbed wire?”

  He took a coffee mug out of the sink, opened the green bottle, and poured a clear liquid in. He set the bottle down.

  “It took you months to finally show up,” he said. “I thought you’d get here sooner.”

  This hit Apollo so hard, he dropped the rolled-up newspaper on the table. “You know about my wife and son, don’t you.”

  “I do.”

  From a cabinet by the sink, he took out an eight-ounce bottle of Ensure. He poured the chalky white drink into the mug that held the clear liquor. He swished the cup to mix the two. He took a gulp. His top lip showed a faint cream mustache.

  “You can help me then.”

  He took a second gulp from the coffee mug, then turned away from Apollo. He picked up a potato and peeled it over the kitchen sink. “Do I want to help you?” he asked.

  “You’re helping my wife,” Apollo said.

  The old man finished with the first potato and got to work peeling the second. The old man looked out of the window above the sink, into the modest paved yard behind his home. Up the slope of the block, he could see the trees of Forest Park.

  “Ever since your wife appeared, I haven’t had a night’s rest,” he said. “All my life I’ve slept well. Even as a baby, my mother told me. But now it’s one hundred and twenty days without a good night’s rest.” He dropped the second peeled potato onto the counter with a thunk. “And it’s all because of your wife.”

  He looked over his shoulder at Apollo. “Will you prepare the cabbage?”

  Apollo watched him, stupefied.

  “You have to core it first.” He pointed at the second supermarket bag impatiently, a grandfather supervising his grandson for the afternoon.

  When Apollo still didn’t move, the old man took out the cabbage and brought it to the table on a cutting board. Apollo would’ve argued more, but there on the board he’d also set out a large utility knife with a serrated blade. Better than rolled-up newspaper as far as weapons went. The old man watched Apollo calmly. Apollo pulled the board to himself and picked up the knife. The old man then turned his back to Apollo and went under the counter for a smaller pot in which to boil the potatoes. The enormous pot with the sheep’s head continued to burble and roil.

  “Jorgen Knudsen,” Apollo said, picking up the knife.

  For the first time, the old man went rigid. He turned from the cupboard and stared at Apollo. But in a moment he recovered his weary whimsy. It might have been that the liquor kicked in.

  “Joe,” he said. “Here in the United States everyone calls me Joe. In America your name must be convenient or it must be changed.”

  Jorgen rose slowly, filled the pot with water.

  “So I’m guessing you know William Wheeler,” Apollo said.

  Jorgen took another pull from the coffee mug, then refilled it with liquor and Ensure. “Is that what he’s calling himself?” He said nothing more. He drank instead.

  Apollo cut the cabbage into quarters, then used the knife to slice out the wedge of cabbage core. Jorgen set the small pot on another burner, and then there was the sound of the tick tick tick as the pilot light caught, and the halo of blue flame appeared. When he looked at Apollo, he seemed pleased.

  “Now chop the cabbage very fine.” He put out his hands for the bits of core, and Apollo handed them to him. Instead of going to the trash bin, he pulled a small pail from under the sink. He dropped the bits of core inside. He caught Apollo staring. “You do compost, don’t you?”

  Apollo brought the knife down into the first section of cabbage, chopping it into fine strips. When Brian had first been born, Emma hadn’t been able to cook anything, of course, and it had fallen to Apollo to prepare foods from his admittedly limited repertoire. Now he felt himself transported back to that sensation of preparation and responsibility. He was making a meal for Emma.

  Because Apollo lost himself in the work, it took a few moments before he realized Jorgen had started speaking to himself, under his breath. He removed a third pot from a cupboard. He came to the kitchen table and swept in the cabbage Apollo had chopped and returned to the counter. He found a bag of flour and poured some in, estimating the proper amount with practiced ease. He finished with another gulp from the mug.

  He recited lines from Outside Over There as he dropped salt and caraway seeds in with the cabbage.

  Apollo joined him. Word for word.

  This stopped Jorgen’s patter. “Why did you say that?” he snapped.

  “I thought we’d recite it together.”

  “You know it?” he asked. “What is it? A song?”

  “A book,” Apollo said. “A fairy tale.”

  He snorted. “Of course.”

  “My father used to read it to me when I was a baby.”

  “That book exactly? Have you ever wondered why?”

  Apollo tapped the tip of the blade against the table. “Yes, but I don’t know.”

  Jorgen turned from the oven. He gulped down the rest of the potion in his mug, then bumped the side of the cup against his forehead. “I hear her in here, day and night. Even right now, as we are speaking. Your wife. She repeats and repeats the words from that book, and I can’t drown it out no matter what I try. I can’t get any sleep because of it. She’s torturing me.” He pulled the mug away from his face and peered in. “I don’t know how she’s doing it. Do you?”

  “She’s a witch,” Apollo said, and he almost sounded proud. He finished chopping.

  Jorgen reached across the table for the cutting board, but Apollo held on to the knife. “You’re scared of Emma,” he said.

  “Yes,” Jorgen said. “I am.”

  He looked at the cutting board in his hand with some surprise. He set it back in front of Apollo as if there were more work to be done. He looked back at the timer. Three hours before the sheep’s head would be ready.

  “I hear her voice,” Jorgen said. “And at night, from my bedroom, I see her out there. Walking in the woods. I see her blue light. A witch. Yes. Did you know that’s who you’d married?”

  Jorgen didn’t leave time for a response. He brought one hand to the collar of his shirt. He undid the top two buttons and pulled back the fabric. A bright red vertical scar appeared near the base of his throat, hardly healed.

  “I did this two months ago. I hit a vein, but not the artery. I bled a lot but only gave myself a real sore throat. The doctors prescribed the Ensure because I can’t eat solid food. I add the liquor to wash it down. That’s a family prescription. It’s called Brennivín. Went to the ICU, but I was back home in four days. I couldn’t even sleep while I was in Jamaica Hospital. Not even with the sedatives. I heard her all that time, even there. I know she will never forgive me.”

  Now Jorgen slipped into the seat across from Apollo.

  “You stole our son.” The words so low, they hardly registered.

  “No,” Jorgen said. “Not me. I’m too old.” He looked up at the ceiling. “But when I was younger, yes, I did my service.”

  “Service,” Apollo repeated. The word singed his tongue.

  Jorgen set both hands flat on the tabletop. The man had been so commanding as he prepared the meal. Sitting like this, though, across the table in a kitchen with linoleum floors and cheap particleboard cupboards, he settled into his age and his drunkenness and his tortured feelings. He seemed to decline right in front of Apollo.

  “I want you to see the living room,” he said. “No point in trying to avoid it anymore.” He looked at the p
ots on the oven and nodded faintly. “She won’t appear without an offering so there’s no point in rushing.”

  He set his hands on the table and pushed himself up.

  Apollo slid out from his seat and peeked into the boiling pot. The sheep’s head had shifted so it grinned right up at him. He followed Jorgen out of the kitchen. He held the utility knife.

  JORGEN LED APOLLO out of the kitchen and across the hallway. The old man opened the door to a den and stepped in. He waved for Apollo to follow. Jorgen’s den had a rectangular shape, as long as the kitchen and dining room combined. The floor had that hideous blue shag carpeting too, and the walls were painted a very faint yellow. It was an almost nauseating combination of colors. Add to that how much hotter this room felt. The dining room had been chilly and the kitchen warm because of the oven, but this room practically boiled. Bad enough that Apollo had to undo his jacket and take off his knit cap. He felt like that sheep’s skull, dropped into a pot.

  There were three space heaters on the floor, in a row along one of the walls, all three on the highest setting. They were the kind Patrice and Dana had used in their basement apartment, the kind Apollo recognized from his childhood. They looked like enormous toaster ovens. Each had a grillwork facade and behind it coils that ran bright orange. If they were left on for hours, they tended to rattle and give off a static buzzing. The three space heaters in the den were doing exactly that now—rattling and buzzing. Jorgen had been running them a long time.

  The den was divided in half—lengthwise—by two tall black Japanese folding wall panels. The shitty, black lacquered kind, the type sold in only the bleakest of neighborhoods. Eight panels all together, a series of outstretched cherry blossom designs. With both fully extended, Apollo couldn’t see what hid on the other side of the den. On this side: the three space heaters on the ground, Jorgen, and a small handful of framed pictures hung on the wall, hovering a few feet above the heaters. Apollo couldn’t make out the images from here in the doorway.

  Jorgen walked closer to those framed pictures, but Apollo stayed still. He felt a whiff of cool air and looked to his right. Down the long hallway he saw the front door of Jorgen’s home. It remained wide open. Winter air free to sneak inside. Apollo had the urge to walk down there and shut the door, but then Jorgen began talking.

  “The first immigrant to have an impact on Queens was the Laurentide ice sheet, twenty thousand years ago,” Jorgen said. “The northern hemisphere was in an ice age, and a glacier in Labrador—we call it Canada now—spread itself across a border that had yet to be drawn up.”

  Jorgen beckoned for Apollo, but still Apollo didn’t move any closer. He scanned the room again, those Japanese screens, wondering if someone, something might be hiding on the other side. Meanwhile this old man wanted to talk about glaciers.

  “The ice sheet reached Wisconsin, then Michigan,” Jorgen continued. “Central Indiana, Illinois. Nothing could stop it. It moved rock and split the earth. When the glacier reached New York, the ice sheet was one thousand feet thick, almost as tall as the Empire State Building. When it finally stopped moving, it lay here, across what we would eventually call New York City, for the next twenty-five hundred years. Eventually the world warmed up again, and that glacier melted away.

  “But by then it had done something miraculous. It had moved enough stone and earth to make a great barrier between the land and the sea. It pushed the Atlantic Ocean back. If it wasn’t for that glacier, all of Queens and Brooklyn would still be underwater today. We’d be underwater right now. All that thanks to one Canadian.”

  Jorgen grinned at Apollo and waved for him once more. He gestured to the photos hung on the wall.

  Apollo finally approached. But since he wasn’t a fool he peeked behind the Japanese panels. No one there. Only the same blue shag carpet on the ground. There were no space heaters on that side. The long wall showed many more framed photos, all hung up. A hundred pictures, maybe more. It put Apollo in mind of a family album. Instead of collecting them in a book, they were spread across this wall. He could see they were pictures of people, but before he could focus, Jorgen came for him.

  “Please, Apollo.” Jorgen touched his arm.

  Apollo turned. How had the old man come so close so quickly? It was this damn shag carpeting, muffling sound.

  Apollo came back around the Japanese panels. Only as he did this did Apollo realize something strange about the den. There weren’t any windows. How was that possible, in a one-family house that stood on a detached plot? The dining room had windows that faced out onto the street. The kitchen looked out onto the small backyard. But this den faced only inward.

  Jorgen brought Apollo back to the framed photos on this wall, the ones hanging right above those three space heaters. The machines sent heat along Apollo’s legs.

  “I told you about the first immigrant,” Jorgen said. “Now let me tell you about some more recent ones.” He raised one hand and tapped at the largest picture here, a framed rendering of a ship at sea.

  “On July 5, 1825, fifty-two Norwegians sailed out of the city of Stavanger in a sloop they named Restoration. Many on board were Quakers seeking religious freedom in America. The Restoration was the first organized group of Norwegian immigrants to come to these shores since the times of the Vikings. It is the Norwegian Mayflower.

  “Their ship, this sloop, was a very small vessel for such a journey. Only fifty-four feet long and sixteen feet wide. It took them fourteen weeks to make the crossing. They arrived in New York harbor on October 9, 1825. Not one passenger died. In fact, the newspaper reported that there was even a birth. One girl, born on board. This was without hospitals or painkillers or any of that. The old way.”

  The space heaters buzzed now, all three at once, so it seemed as if some large, metallic insect had landed in the windowless den. Apollo could feel sweat beading on his neck and chin.

  “Their journey became national news. Because they’d made the trip in a sloop, the newspapers called the Norwegians the Sloopers. The question that most fascinated the public was how on earth these people had made it across the Atlantic on this tiny ship. It seemed improbable. Impossible. Even most of the people on board didn’t know the truth.

  “Their leader, Lars Larsen, spoke only of their desire for religious freedom. He spoke of the singular goodness and liberty of the United States. He said all the right things. The Sloopers were granted access. They became Americans. Soon the most important question about them was no longer asked: How had they made this impossible trip? How had they crossed the Atlantic? I can tell you. They had help.”

  For an instant, Apollo felt himself back on North Brother Island and Cal there with him as they watched the trawler chugging out to open waters.

  “The big one can swim,” he muttered.

  “Yes, he can,” Jorgen said, watching Apollo with a look of surprise.

  Now Jorgen pointed to another sketch. People this time. Far fewer than fifty-three. Only three in fact. Two women and one man.

  “The Sloopers settled around here too, but it didn’t last long. Most soon followed Lars Larsen and his family. They moved upstate, to Orleans County. It became the first Norwegian colony in America since Leiv Eriksson reached these shores in the year one thousand.”

  “Leif Eriksson?” Apollo corrected, a holdover of whatever he’d learned in some elementary school class.

  “I suppose,” Jorgen said.

  Jorgen looked back at the sketch. “These three did not go on,” he said. “Instead they remained here in Queens. Still mostly farmland then. Little Norway, as this neighborhood came to be called. These three started it. This sketch was made about eight months after they arrived in America.”

  Jorgen tapped the glass, the man’s face, beardless and thin. The ink drawing hardly qualified as a sketch, but still the eyes were vivid, much too large, which made it seem as if the man were staring at Apollo and Jorgen across time, seeing them even now.

  “That’s my ancestor, Nils. My great-grea
t-great-grandfather.”

  He tapped the first of the two women, also thin, and taller than Nils. Her hands were crossed in front of her. Her hair was hidden under a scarf.

  “This is my great-great-great-grandmother, Petra.”

  Last he tapped the third woman. Small, wearing a shawl over her dress. Her mouth had been drawn in so faintly, she seemed to have none. Her eyes were tiny, hardly there. Her shoulders soft and slumped. It was as if the woman were turning into a phantom, fading away.

  “And this is Anna Sofie. Nils’s first wife.”

  “He married them both?”

  “Well.” Jorgen smiled. “Not at the same time.”

  “All three of them were on the sloop?” Apollo asked.

  “Oh yes,” Jorgen said. “Nils and Anna Sofie had been married four years when they boarded the Restoration. They were not Quakers, but they were ready to try their fortunes in a new place. It’s possible Nils had to escape the country, I can’t say. The ship’s captain offered work to men who agreed to crew the ship. Nils bargained for Anna Sofie’s passage. She was already pregnant. Anna Sofie is the one who gave birth on the trip.”

  “A girl, you said. What was her name?”

  Jorgen’s hand lowered from the frame. “Agnes Knudsdatter.”

  “Agnes?” Apollo whispered. He recovered his composure. “If she was born on the ship, how come she’s not in the picture?”

  Jorgen pursed his lips. “Agnes was dead by then. Anna Sofie never really recovered from the loss. My father remarried Petra eventually.”

  Apollo looked at Anna Sofie’s faded face again. Now she seemed erased by grief. “What about Anna Sofie?” he asked. “She stuck around here after the divorce?” The room felt intolerably hot. Apollo sweated in front of the heaters.

  “She went off into the forest.”

  “The forest? What for?”

  “She wanted to find her daughter. She knew Agnes was somewhere out there.”

  “What about Nils?” Apollo asked, looking away from the rendering, facing Jorgen. “Did Nils help look? Did he try?”

  Jorgen raised his hands. “Well no, of course not.”