The Changeling

by Victor Lavalle

  Upturned on the floor, right near his feet, lay a bowl. His bowl. Morning breakfast. Oatmeal spread in a burst.

  And there on the oven, finally, he found the source of all that screaming.

  Not a person, but a kettle.

  The flame was turned high, and the water inside was on the boil. The kettle wailed and spewed a plume of smoke from its snout. A little dragon. It had been sitting on the fire for so long, the water inside roiling, that it jiggled and jumped on the stovetop. The kettle couldn’t wait to pounce.

  But at least it was only a kettle. Not a person in pain after all. The only one in danger was him. For a moment, this even relieved him. Take a breath. But then his body shook all over, the legs and arms clanging in their chains. All this was for him? He was surprised to be alive. The burning kettle wailed a wet threat: his current condition would not last.

  His mouth opened then, and he called out hoarsely. It was a woman’s name, but you wouldn’t know it. A slurred sound, that’s all it was.

  He tried a second time. “Em?”

  If he’d been a boy, he would have called for his mother. Since he was a man, he called to his wife.

  “Emma?” he tried again, but who could hear him over the kettle? He barely heard himself. And after that third try, a spasm of pain shot up from his left foot, through his thigh, and into the small of his back. So bad it made him twist, which teased the bike lock, and in retaliation it choked him backward again. This time it was the back of his head, not his neck, that glanced against the steam pipe. It burned right through his short hair, but he controlled himself this time. He didn’t lurch too far forward, so he was spared another squeeze around the throat. He panted in the kitchen. Out of breath and out of ideas.

  “Brian,” he whispered.

  Emma and Brian. His family. He forgot his chains, his pains, the instruments of violence scattered across the room. Where was his family? Were they safe? Despite the months of distance between Apollo and Emma, in this moment he drew her back to his heart, as close as his son, instantly. She’d gone out that morning. She’d left her keys. He’d locked her out. At least she wasn’t here then. But that left only him and Brian. Now the kettle’s screeching seemed like the voice of his newer fear. Not for himself but for the boy.

  And just then, he heard the creak of the floorboards in the next room.

  From his chair, in the corner, he could look out of the kitchen and see the back room. Its off-white door was shut. Good as his word, he’d paid the super to hang the door in Brian’s room, and now he couldn’t regret the improvement more. If they hadn’t hung the fucking door, he wouldn’t have to sit here looking at it, nauseous with fear. If the door hadn’t been there, at least he could have seen who was in the back room rather than waiting for the monster to be revealed. Unlike pain, the ache of anticipation gets so deep inside you, it can’t be soothed by adrenaline or shock. It’s a torture to the nervous system. As he watched the door of the back room, his nerves were being shocked in wave after wave.

  The door creaked as it swung back. The kettle insisted that it not be ignored. The left side of his face almost seemed to burn from the high-pitched screeching. A figure stood in the doorway.

  Apollo felt a child’s terror, overwhelming and immense.

  The back room was completely dark even though he could see, through the kitchen window, that it was light out. A sunny day. This was happening under pleasant skies. The blackout curtains were down in Brian’s room. They were meant to keep the room as dark as a cave. And they did. But now that darkness hid the person stepping out, and whatever he had done inside it.

  “Just…” he groaned.

  Just what? What sentence was he trying to shape? Just leave? Just let me free? No. Just let my son go. That’s what he was trying to say. And even he was surprised to realize those were the words he meant. Surprised because a person never really knows how he or she will react at those worst moments, do they? Each of us hopes to be brave, to be kind, to be heroic. But how often do we get the chance to find out which it’ll be? But in this moment the thing he was willing to beg for was the life of his son. He would’ve done it for Emma, too.

  The bottom of the teakettle must’ve been scorched black by the high flame by now. The water inside nearly as hot as the surface of the sun. Let this attacker pour it over his scalp, let his skin bubble and burst, let his eyes melt right out of his skull. Okay, okay. He would scream and die. All right. But put Brian out in the hall first. At least then he’d have a chance of being found by a neighbor, of being safe. Maybe Emma had even taken a seat out there, perched in the hallway right now. Give Brian to her, and do whatever you want with me.

  The floorboards in the little hallway between the back room and kitchen creaked just as loudly as the ones in the back room had done. It was an old apartment. Every board was brittle. Now they creaked and popped, here and there, as the figure stomped into view.

  Smaller than expected. Short and thin.

  How had this little man overpowered him? Apollo wondered. There was a throb in his stomach. He couldn’t even remember how this guy had gotten into the apartment. They had a security gate over the window in Brian’s room. They were on the fourth floor. Too high to scale the side of the building and slip in through an unguarded window. Too low to drop down from the roof on the sixth floor. Maybe this was the man who’d been sending pictures to Emma. If he could send her pictures then snatch them away, maybe slipping into a locked apartment proved no trouble at all. Oh God, Apollo was willing to believe Emma now. Much too late. Much too late.

  The stranger, this creature, brought along something else. A low noise. Even in his chair Apollo could make the sound out through the noise of the teakettle’s trill. Grumbling. Mumbling. The monster was talking to itself. He couldn’t understand the words, but the bass of the voice rumbled, something seismic about it. He felt it below his feet.

  The monster’s hair was long and hung over its face. The locks were ratty and dry. It slumped as it moved forward, which only made it seem more ghoulish. It stepped into the kitchen, brushed past him. So close. Only inches. He shot forward. The chair underneath him rose, and its legs banged against the floor. Despite the chains around his shins, the ones around his wrists, he would’ve crashed into this little man, this thug, with so much force that it would’ve gone through the fridge.

  But that bike lock wasn’t playing.

  Apollo lurched forward like that and choked himself so badly that he almost passed out. Not so surprising. He’d been close to unconsciousness moments ago. Maybe he’d been floating up and down, from the depths to the shallows, for much longer than he realized. Maybe he and this monster had gone back and forth like this a few times already. The claw hammer on the counter, the carving knife on the windowsill. Maybe he’d been stabbed and bludgeoned already and just couldn’t see his body well enough to tell from this angle. Maybe the kitchen floor right beneath him had already been restained by his lost blood. The stabbing chills throughout his body made it impossible to distinguish between a cut and a crack and a mortal wound.

  Meanwhile his home invader didn’t even seem to notice him. Walked right past the grown man choking in the corner, went to the oven, and finally turned off the flame. The teakettle yelped for another few seconds. The water bubbled inside the little cauldron.

  But why didn’t that make the screaming stop?

  Without the distraction of the steaming kettle, he could hear, distinctly, from the back room…

  It wasn’t. It wasn’t. He tried to calm himself, but it was so much harder now. A child was crying in the back room. Who else’s child could it be?

  Apollo’s body seemed to lose all shape. He felt larger, like the size of a star, the sun. A burning gaseous form. Too enormous for the small kitchen of a two-bedroom apartment. Why weren’t walls disintegrating? How soon before the floor and ceiling singed into dust? Why hadn’t the world been burned to ashes instantly? His terror flared hotter than the star at the center of our solar
system. I am the god, Apollo! I am the god, Apollo! He rose in his chair. If the bike lock choked him, he couldn’t feel it.

  What had been done to his child?

  He found his voice, but not his words. He growled at the little man in his kitchen. The one holding the kettle of scalding water. What threat could that pose now? He bellowed at the home invader while in the other room his son squealed. The figure in the kitchen stood in place. It was holding the teakettle not by the handle but in its palm. Its flesh must’ve been burning, but the hand didn’t quiver. The invader finally held his gaze. The creature saw him there, chained in the corner, spitting and raving and rattling his chains.

  And now the man in chains could see his attacker clearly.

  “Emma?”

  In the back room his son’s cries turned into hiccupping shrieks. Brian was six months, but these were the cries of a newborn. That special senseless yelping. They ride one on top of the other, the next one begun before the first has even finished. Not only pain. Also confusion. And such naked weakness. The cries that make a new parent panic right inside the bones.

  Emma Valentine had come out of that room.

  “Emma,” he tried. “What did you do?”

  Maybe nothing yet. Maybe Brian was only terrified and not hurt badly. The weapons were all here in the kitchen, weren’t they? Even in this nightmarish moment, he fussed at a thorn of hope.

  She watched him.

  The steaming kettle sitting on her palm made her look like a waiter, about to bring a tray to a table. How could she not feel the pain? He could see her palm had turned red. Despite his son’s screams, he could even hear the flesh of her hand roasting. The air smelled like burned charcoal now. And yet his wife registered none of it. She stood in the room, but she wasn’t there.

  “It’s been hard on you, Emma,” he began. “I’ve been hard on you.”

  He set back on the chair because his vision had been going blurry, and he realized the bike lock could still hurt him even if he couldn’t feel it now.

  “You’ve been so broken down, and everything seems to make life feel worse.”

  She watched him. She didn’t speak. How could this be his wife? She looked drained, as if her whole soul had been siphoned out. She looked almost green. A likeness of his wife carved out of slate. She stayed there, silent. He thought maybe, deep inside, she wanted him to talk her out of whatever she had planned.

  “You’re not the only one. It happens to mothers all the time. Emma, it’s not just you. Kim told us that before you went on the meds. I can hear Brian in there. He still sounds…strong. There’s nothing that happened here that we can’t fix.”

  She shuffled and looked away from him. For the first time her hand and the kettle wobbled, as if she finally felt the pain. As if she was coming back to herself.

  “Just let me loose. We’ll check on Brian.”

  Hearing her son’s name seemed to work on her like some post-hypnotic suggestion. Her head tilted backward as if she’d gone into a trance. Her eyes became electrified. There was his wife. He had her. Appeal to that woman. The mother of Brian. Sister of Kim. Friend of Nichelle. Professional librarian. The woman who’d lived in Brazil. The girl from Boones Mill. His wife. All these versions of her were women who would never willingly hurt her only child.

  But Apollo was wrong. He didn’t have her.

  With her free hand, Emma grabbed the claw hammer off the counter. She stepped toward Apollo with one fluid motion and drove the hammer’s face into the side of his head. Apollo’s cheekbone cracked. He heard the bone chipping, the sound played loudly inside his skull. And suddenly the right side of his mouth wouldn’t open as easily. His vision shifted, the bottom half going dark, as if his eyeball had just slipped out of its housing. Through the left side of his mouth he pleaded, even as Emma, his wife of five years, dropped the hammer to the floor.

  She walked past him now. He rose from the chair again. What pain could compare to what Brian would go through? Nothing. Not one damned thing. He rose in the chair, and the bike lock barked him back down. His weight crashed with such force that one chair leg broke right through the thin wooden floorboard. So now his chair went back down at a new angle, and his throat caught on the bike lock yet again. But this time good posture wouldn’t help. He was like a ship listing to port. He was sinking. The bike lock became a noose. He was going down.

  “Don’t hurt Brian,” he pleaded.

  His wife walked out of the kitchen.

  In the hallway, just before the back room, she turned to him. She raised the kettle of scalding water.

  “Don’t hurt my son.”

  The child wept and choked and coughed and cried.

  “Please don’t hurt my baby,” he begged.

  As she stepped back into the darkened room, he sank into a darkness of his own.

  Spots appeared in his eyes, and still he strained so hard that blood coughed out of his mouth.

  Emma spoke then, clearly and directly.

  “It’s not a baby,” she said.

  RECOVERY.

  The word defined as “the regaining of, or possibility of regaining, something lost or taken away.” Economic recovery. Data recovery. Asset recovery. Common enough terms these days. A plausible matter with information once held on a computer or funds siphoned out of some savings account. Even the human body will validate the noun. For instance, a fractured cheekbone, the result of a hammer shattering it, can be repaired with surgery. A zygomatic orbital fracture (a secondary result of the fractured cheekbone) will require a slight realignment of the eye, but once the eye has been lifted, set back in its proper place, the zygomatic rim can be reconstructed. Within weeks recovery will be noted. Bruising to wrists and elbows and even the throat will not last. Burst blood vessels heal. Topical treatments containing vitamin K applied to the skin are suggested. Bodies recover.

  But what about the soul?

  How long would it take for Apollo to “regain” what had been “lost or taken away?” A son. A wife he’d thought he’d known. A marriage. Three lives.

  Apollo had time to consider all this as he waited with 149 other men in cells, the prisoners called them bullpens, as they were prepared for release from Rikers Island. The men were so tightly packed against one another that two had already fainted where they stood. Apollo, and the other men, had been in the bullpen for eleven hours already as the guards ran through whatever mysterious procedures demanded a half day to get done. Anyway, Apollo had been quite lucky compared to some of the other men here. On Rikers Island for only two months. And he’d been held in Taylor, filled mostly with short-timers. It had been as calm a bid as a man could hope for. Apollo was processed—his clothes and belongings handed to him in a brown paper bag—the only prisoner leaving who didn’t want to be released.

  Four blue and white buses filled up, and the atmosphere bubbled. The men on Apollo’s bus ranged in age from seventeen to fifty-eight, but every one of them bounced in his seat like a child off to sleepaway camp. One of the guards on the bus occasionally growled for the prisoners to be quiet. You’re grown-ass men! he’d say, but he was wrong. They were kids again.

  Kids up early. Prisoners released from Rikers Island were driven from the jail out to Queensboro Plaza before dawn. Dropped off with their bag of possessions and an envelope containing just enough money for one ride on the subway and a grande cup of coffee. Apollo sat by the window and watched the bus cross the bridge into Queens. He hadn’t been scared for even a moment in prison. He followed orders, he never made a phone call, he always wore his ID and kept his shirt tucked into his pants. An untucked shirt could send certain guards into an unfathomable rage. He made an impression on no one and liked it that way. The story of Emma Valentine and Baby Brian, as their son came to be known, made the news. Baby Brian killed by his mother; Emma Valentine disappeared and on the run. His family had become the cast in a horror movie. Was it any wonder he wanted to become invisible in jail?

  The act that landed Apollo in pr
ison, using a shotgun to hold three people hostage, that was its own story, too. There hadn’t been much sympathy for him inside Rikers. No veteran prisoner wanted to help keep his spirits up. Everyone had their own problems. They were on Rikers, after all. Apollo considered this a relief. He existed in a state of suspended animation. A body compelled to move here or there, eat on schedule, shower once a day, but there was nothing more to him. Apollo became convinced his heart had failed, or been removed, when he’d been in surgery for his eye. It made sense that he felt no fear in jail because he wasn’t actually alive. He died when Brian died.

  But as the bus approached Queensboro Plaza, he felt revived, revitalized. This wasn’t a good thing. His heart pulsed in his chest, and he felt invaded by some alien presence. The men around him were joking about how quickly they’d cop once they arrived. Before the plaza had been made over, there was a Twin Donut where prostitutes waited for the newly released men to get out. They’d be stuffed up together, four women to a booth, quite aware of how desperate these men would be for their service. An old-timer shared this information in nostalgic tones.

  “They still there,” another man said. “They wait at the spot on Twenty-seventh Street now. Panini Grill.”

  “What the fuck is a panini?” the old convict asked.

  One of the youngest laughed. “Things change, old head. You can’t fight that.”

  Apollo’s heart beat louder with each block they passed. For most men leaving Rikers, the Queensboro Plaza drop counted as a remote location. So many of them were from Brooklyn or the Bronx or Uptown, and the trip home from here would take hours, easy for the plaza to feel like one last fuck you from the Department of Corrections. But Apollo knew Queensboro Plaza well. Had a good idea of exactly how long it would take to get him back to Washington Heights.

  He hadn’t been home since the morning Brian died. Not once. He’d been discovered by the super who called the paramedics, and they took him to New York Presbyterian Hospital. He stayed there until after the surgery to repair his eye. Upon release, he went to Lillian’s to recover. While there he met with detectives from the NYPD and agents from the FBI. Brian had been dead three weeks by the time Apollo returned to Washington Heights.