The Changeling. Victor LaValle

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      Lillian didn’t fully grasp the kind of child her son was until a Saturday in early October when their neighbor, Mrs. Ortiz from downstairs, came to the apartment. Mrs. Ortiz was there to see not Lillian but her son. Lillian’s immediate guess was that Apollo had done something wrong, but Mrs. Ortiz only waved a dollar bill in the air saying Apollo had promised her the issue of People magazine with that sweet Julia Roberts girl on the cover, but he hadn’t come by with it yet. After a few minutes Lillian sorted through her confusion, and consternation, to understand that her son had been selling off the books and magazines she’d been bringing home. She felt so aggravated that she went into Apollo’s room, found the issue amid one of the stacks on the floor, and gave it to Mrs. Ortiz for free. She tried to throw in a more recent issue with Barbara Bush on the cover, but Mrs. Ortiz didn’t know who that was.

      Apollo returned home right around sundown. New York had been going through a warm spell so the day had been only in the mid-seventies. He and his friends had been at Flushing Meadows Park playing two-hand touch until the temperature finally cooled. He showed up grimy but glowing. Lillian let him find her in the kitchen. She’d spent the late afternoon putting all the magazines and mass-market paperbacks into garbage bags. Those bags were on the small kitchen table instead of dinner. Before Apollo could ask why, Lillian told him about the visit from Mrs. Ortiz.

      “I went through the trouble of getting those things for you because I thought you were going to read them,” Lillian said. Now she lifted one bag, grunting with the weight. “But if not, we can just drop all these down to the incinerator.”

      Apollo untied one of the bags and peeked inside. “I do read them,” he said. “All of them. But after I’m done, what should I do?”

      “Throw them away, Apollo. What else?” She tied the bag closed again.

      “But Mrs. Ortiz likes reading People, so . . .”

      “So why not charge an old woman?”

      “She pays me a quarter. Cover price is $1.95. That’s a great deal for her, and she doesn’t care if it’s a few weeks old. What’s wrong with that?”

      Lillian opened her mouth to answer him but found she didn’t have a ready reply. She scanned the bags. “You sell all of it?”

      “The stuff I can’t sell, I throw away, but I do pretty good around the neighborhood.”

      “You’re twelve,” Lillian said, sitting down with a plop. “Where did you learn to do this?”

      Apollo remained silent a moment, then smiled widely. “You, Mom. I learned it by watching you.”

      “What does that mean?”

      “You work so hard. I see that. And I’m your son. It’s in my blood.”

      Lillian pointed to the chair beside her, and Apollo sat there. She watched him for a long count.

      “If you’re going to run a business, you should have business cards,” she said. “Your name should be on them, and a phone number. I guess we could put the home phone there. I’ll get them made for you. I can get them for free through my office.”

      Lillian rose from her chair and returned a moment later with a sheet of typing paper and a pen. She drew a large rectangle and scribbled in a few lines:

       Apollo Kagwa

       Used Books & Magazines

      She crossed out that second line and wrote in another.

      Affordable Books & Magazines.

      Under that she wrote their phone number.

      Then she set the tip of her pen at the top of the rectangle, right above Apollo’s name. “You’ll need a name for the business.” She waited on him, pen poised.

      He slipped the pen from her hand and wrote it in himself.

      Improbabilia.

      APOLLO KAGWA MIGHT’VE gone to college if it wasn’t for a man named Carlton Lake. Apollo was a senior at John Bowne High School, and based on his grades, he qualified as absolutely average. Bs and Cs straight down the report card. It had been that way since ninth grade. A surprise to some of his teachers since the kid could be counted on for brains and even study, but school wasn’t his true enthusiasm. All Apollo Kagwa cared about was his business.

      By the age of seventeen, he’d turned Improbabilia into a thriving concern. The kid was known in Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx. Rare and used book dealers learned of him because he would call a shop cold and ask if he could stop by, a fellow dealer who happened to be near and wanted to make a courtesy visit. Sure, they’d say, baffled by the decorum. These guys weren’t generally known for their Emily Post. And soon enough some fifteen-year-old black kid clomps in, he’s got a pack on his back that would make a mule buckle, and he introduces himself as Apollo. The kid’s glasses are so large, they should have windshield wipers.

      He enters their stores and tries selling off weathered issues of magazines like The Connoisseur and Highlights. The combination of entrepreneurial spirit and absolute naïveté was enough to make some of those old booksellers fall hard for that fifteen-year-old. Through them he got the education he craved. They taught him how to value a book, how to navigate estate sales, and the best spots to set up a table at antique shows.

      Other booksellers were far less welcoming. When he shared his stock, trying to sell, they accused him of having stolen the merchandise. Maybe he’d broken into a storefront and looted whatever he could. A few stores—the higher-end spots in Manhattan—had buzzer entry at the doors. This was the era of Bernhard Goetz shooting black boys on the subway and many white folks in the city cheering him on. Every kid with excess melanin became a superpredator, even a black boy with glasses and a backpack full of books. He might be standing at the entrance for fifteen minutes while the clerks pretended not to notice him.

      To make things worse, Apollo would find himself wondering if he actually was frightening, a monster, the kind that would drive his own father away. That conviction flared brightest at moments like this, when the world seemed to corroborate his monstrousness. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be consumed. To endure these humiliations, these supernovas of self-loathing, Apollo dreamed up a mantra—or maybe the words came to him from some old memory—one he’d repeat to himself while he stood there being judged. I am the god, Apollo. I am the god, Apollo. I am the god, Apollo. He’d chant it enough that he soon felt downright divine. But that didn’t mean those store owners let him in.

      In 1995, senior year of high school, he got accepted to Queens College, but the summer before school started, one of the dealers who mentored Apollo gave him his graduation gift, Confessions of a Literary Archaeologist by a man named Carlton Lake.

      Lake gives a history of his life as a collector of rare and valuable books, manuscripts, music scores, and even letters from the era of Napoleon. While the collector, and his collection, apparently became quite famous, the early part of the book details how he came to love these materials. He’d been a big reader and browser of secondhand bookstores. When it came time to start truly collecting books, the kind that cost more than a couple of quarters, Lake mentions he was “abetted by an indulgent grandmother.” In other words, СКАЧАТЬ