The Changeling is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Victor LaValle
Interior illustration: © iStockphoto.com/AdrianHillman
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
SPIEGEL & GRAU and Design is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: LaValle, Victor D., author.
Title: The changeling : a novel / by Victor LaValle.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Spiegel & Grau, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016049361 | ISBN 9780812995947 (hardback) | ISBN 9780812995954 (ebook)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Fantasy / General. | FICTION / Thrillers.
Classification: LCC PS3562.A8458 C48 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016049361
Ebook ISBN 9780812995954
randomhousebooks.com
spiegelandgrau.com
Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Greg Mollica
Cover illustration: Yuko Shimizu
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Part 1: First Comes Love
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part 2: Then Comes Marriage
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part 3: Then Comes Baby in a Baby Carriage
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Part 4: Shit, Damn, Motherfucker
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Part 5: The Wise Ones
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Part 6: Big Dig
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Part 7: Kindergarten
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Part 8: The Wildness
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Dedication
By Victor LaValle
About the Author
When you believe in things you don’t understand then you suffer.
—STEVIE WONDER, “Superstition”
THIS FAIRY TALE begins in 1968 during a garbage strike. In February New York City’s sanitation workers refused to pick up trash for eight straight days. One hundred thousand tons of garbage filled the sidewalks, spilled into the streets. Rats ran laps alongside morning joggers. Rubbish fires boiled the air. The five boroughs had been given up for dead. Still, there was some cracked magic in the air because that was when Lillian and Brian met. Each had journeyed from far-flung lands to find one another in Queens. Neither could’ve guessed the wildness that falling in love would unleash.
Lillian Kagwa emigrated from Uganda while Brian West arrived from the only slightly less foreign territory of Syracuse. This daughter of East Africa and son of upstate New York met at a cut-rate modeling agency on Northern Boulevard. Neither was a client.
The week of the garbage strike Lillian got hired as a secretary at the agency, greeting guests at the front desk. A pleasant sight for folks strolling sidewalks saddled with week-old waste. Brian, a parole officer, had been paying occasional visits to the agency’s founder, Pavel Aresenyev, one of his parolees, who’d spent four years in prison for fraud. Brian didn’t believe Pavel had gone legit. But that week Brian became focused less on Mr. Aresenyev and more on the new secretary who greeted him when he arrived. Meeting her felt like finding a rose growing in a landfill. Brian dropped by the modeling agency four times that week.
Despite his immediate attraction, Brian had a habit of mispronouncing Lillian Kagwa’s last name, and Lillian kept mistaking Brian for other white men. Hardly kismet. Still Brian West—short, stocky, and persistent—simply wouldn’t quit. And on the days when he didn’t show up, Lillian, to her own surprise, found she missed him.
Lillian Kagwa had come from Jinja, the second-largest city in Uganda, where she’d lived through the country’s emancipation from Britain and its eventual homegrown rule by Milton Obote. Obote used the army and his secret police, the General Service Unit, to rule the land. They spread wickedness wherever they went.
In 1967 Lillian and three cousins were traveling to the capital, Kampala, when they were pulled over by three men claiming to be agents of the GSU. The four cousins sat quietly as the agents inspected their identification, then demanded the only male cousin—Arthur—come out and open the trunk. Arthur didn’t want to leave Lillian and his sisters and hesitated. In that moment, one agent leaned in and casually shot Arthur in the stomach.
Lillian and her cousins were temporarily deafened by the sound, blinded by the muzzle flash, but Lillian still sensed the agent who’d fired the gun pawing inside the car to pull out the keys. Lillian, at the wheel, shifted the car into drive and shot off before her senses had returned to her, weaving across the two-lane road like a drunk. The agents fired at the car but couldn’t pursue it; their own vehicle had run out of gas. They’d set up the checkpoint to steal a suitable vehicle and would have to wa
it for another.
Lillian reached Kampala in half an hour, speeding the whole way. Arthur died long before that. An incident like this hardly counted as newsworthy. Uganda, as a whole, was going buckwild, and Lillian Kagwa wanted out. One year later Lillian secured a visa to the United States.
In 1968 Lillian came to New York. She was twenty-five and knew no one, but because of Uganda’s British rule, she already spoke the king’s English, and this made her transition easier. One of the reason’s Mr. Aresenyev hired her at the modeling agency was because her command of English was so much better than his. She made the business sound serious, legitimate, though Brian West’s suspicions were right: the whole thing was a scam. Lillian didn’t know this when she accepted the work. All she knew was the job paid twice the state minimum wage, three bucks an hour. Back in Uganda, she hadn’t been able to find work of any kind, so she cherished the gig. And what was a garbage strike compared with state-sanctioned murder?
The agency, Glamour Time, was run out of a windowless second-floor office near Queensboro Plaza, remote from any hub of high fashion but centrally located for soaking the aspiring models of working-class Queens. Potential clients could join the agency as long as they had headshots. Luckily, Mr. Aresenyev had a small studio right there at the agency and could snap the shots himself for a fee. For certain young women, he offered to take the shots after hours, just the two of them. The streets of New York were overrun with uncollected garbage, but Glamour Time carried its own stink. The only honest aspect of the business was the East African woman answering phones out front.
Mr. Aresenyev’s business might’ve run just fine for quite a while, soaking hopeful young women for years, except his damn parole officer had made the front office into his second home. How were you going to run a decent fraud when a cop was stopping by every other morning? Brian West was bad for business. And since he was smitten with Lillian that meant Lillian Kagwa was bad for business. So Mr. Aresenyev fired her. Not the smartest plan, but Mr. Aresenyev wasn’t bright. Now Brian pursued Pavel relentlessly, an Inspector Javert from Onondaga County. Charging for the headshots wasn’t illegal, but running a photo studio without a permit was enough to count as a violation of parole. Pavel Aresenyev went back to jail. Brian West got a commendation. Lillian Kagwa needed a new job.
She worked as an administrative secretary at a law firm in midtown Manhattan. The new job paid less. She moved into a smaller apartment. She cut off all communications with Brian. He’d cost her a good job, and the commute to midtown added a half hour of travel time each way, so no, she did not want to get dinner and a movie with Brian, thank you. Anyway, she was young, and it was New York City, where a lot more fun was to be had than back in Jinja. They met in 1968 but didn’t go on their first real date until eight years later.
Brian West gave Lillian room, backed off by a borough; he rented a place on Staten Island, but he couldn’t stop thinking of her. Why? What was it about Lillian? He couldn’t quite explain. It was as if she’d cast a spell.
—
Brian West had been the only child of two wildly unromantic drunks. At twelve Brian had a job selling candy at the Elmwood Theatre. He made the mistake of proudly displaying his earnings to his father, Frank. He expected a pat on the shoulder, words of congratulations; instead the boy endured a strong-arm robbery right in his own living room. His dad bought a case of Genesee beer with the money. Mom and Dad finished it before bedtime. A household like that will either break you or toughen you up. Maybe both. What was waiting on a woman to forgive you compared with having your father beat you up and steal your first paycheck?
Late in 1976 it finally happened. Brian West and Lillian Kagwa went on a date. They’d both been twenty-five when they first met during the week of the garbage strike, but now they were thirty-three. Lillian had met a lot of men during those intervening years, and Brian benefited from the comparison. He worked hard, didn’t drink, saved his money, and paid his debts. Funny how much she valued such qualities now. The only hiccup came at dinner, when Brian talked about how much he wanted children, the chance to be a husband and a father. As soon as he’d seen her at Glamour Time he’d sensed she would be a wonderful mother. When he finished talking she reminded him, gently, that this was their first date. Maybe they could wait to make wedding plans until after the movie at least? To Brian’s credit, he didn’t act wounded or angry—he laughed. He didn’t know it, but it was at this moment that Lillian truly fell for him.
He took her to see Rocky. It wouldn’t have been Lillian’s choice, but halfway through the movie, she started to enjoy herself. She even saw herself on the screen. A fierce dreamer. That’s what this movie was about. And wasn’t that her? She liked to think so. Maybe that was why Brian brought her to see this picture. To show her something about himself that he could never put into words. He’d told her the story of being robbed by his father, and she’d told him about Arthur getting gutshot in the car, and now here they both were in a darkened Times Square theater. Together. A pair of survivors. It seemed so unlikely—all the life that had led them here—as improbable as myth. In the dark she held his hand. Though they wouldn’t have sex for another three hours, it would be accurate to say their first child—their only child—was conceived right then. A thought, an idea, a shared dream; parenthood is a story two people start telling together.
By April 1977 Lillian was showing. Brian found them a two-bedroom apartment in Jackson Heights. Their son came in September. Brian thought it would be weird to name a half-black kid Rocky, so instead they named him Apollo. Brian liked to carry the newborn in the crook of one arm, cooing to him, “You are the god, Apollo. Good night, my little sun.” And they lived happily ever after. At least for a few years.
By Apollo’s fourth birthday Brian West was gone.
Brian hadn’t run off with another woman or skipped town to move back to Syracuse. The man might as well have been erased from existence. He couldn’t be found because he’d left no trail, neither breadcrumbs nor credit card receipts. Gone. Disappeared. Vanished.
When Apollo was born, Brian and Lillian thought they’d reached the end of the story, but they’d been wrong. The wildness had only begun.
RIGHT AFTER BRIAN went missing, the boy began having a recurring dream. Since he was only four, Lillian couldn’t make much sense of the details. Most of it came in the long hurried babble of a scared child in the night, but she pieced it together. There was a man knocking at the front door. When Apollo unlocked it, the man pushed his way in. He knelt down in front of Apollo. He had a face, but he took off that face. The face underneath was the face of his daddy. Brian West opened his mouth, and a cloud spilled from his mouth. Apollo watched the fog roll out from his father’s throat and began to cry. The mist filled the apartment until the boy could hardly see. His daddy picked him up. Now the sound of rushing water, loud as a waterfall, filled the apartment. Apollo’s father carried him through the fog. His father finally spoke to him. Right about then Apollo would wake up screaming.
This nightmare came to the kid night after night for weeks. Apollo no longer wanted to sleep, and Lillian couldn’t shut her eyes because she knew, at some point, her four-year-old boy would be in terror.
You’re coming with me.
That’s what Brian told Apollo in the dream.
While trying to console him, Lillian asked why those words made him wake with such fear. His answer cut her down through flesh and bone. It wasn’t fear that made him cry out. It was longing.
“Why didn’t he take me with him?” Apollo said.
Eventually the nightmare passed, or at least, Apollo stopped talking about it. This let life reset to its new normal: Lillian, a single mother who worked full time, taking classes on Saturdays to become a legal secretary, and raising her child alone, a life both grueling and rewarding. Apollo, a bookish child, growing up to be self-contained and watchful.
They stumbled along like this for eight more years. By the time Apollo turned twelve, they never spoke o
f Brian West and neither expected to make him a topic of conversation for the rest of their days, but then one afternoon Apollo received a message from the man. A gift.
THIS WAS IN the fall of 1989, and Apollo Kagwa was a junior high school student at IS 237 in Flushing. With Brian gone Lillian reverted to her maiden name and she damn sure did the same for her son. He became a Kagwa by legal decree. They erased the West from their lives.
—
Even a self-contained and watchful kid like Apollo could end up running with a crew. He had two best friends and did well in American history with Mr. Perrault. Lillian had passed her classes to become a legal secretary and found a better job at a law firm in midtown Manhattan. But the work had her keeping even longer hours, not getting home until eight o’clock sometimes. Latchkey kid was the term. Adults lamented this new reality on the Donahue show. They scolded working mothers who were damaging their poor kids by their need to make a living.
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