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There was a certain freedom in knowing you were in a dream.
He liked to believe he’d inherited a taste for texts.
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.
Maybe a woman that small had to learn how to assert herself early, a survival technique to keep from being overrun or ignored.
Her flight wouldn’t arrive until late at night, she wrote, and he might not even be interested in seeing her anymore, but if he did want to see her, she’d love for his face to be the first one she found at arrivals.
Tipsy people are chatty, drunks harangue.
Nichelle trailed them by half a block shouting words so slurred they became an invented language.
Apollo had become one of those men. The New Dads. So much better than the Old Dads of the past. New Dads wear their children. New Dads change the baby’s diaper three times a night. New Dads do the dishes and the laundry. New Dads cook the meals. New Dads read the infant development books and do more research online. New Dads apply coconut oil to the baby’s crotch to avoid diaper rash. New Dads bake sweet potatoes, then grind them in the blender once the baby is old enough for solid foods. New Dads carry the diaper bag—really a big old purse—without awareness of shame. New Dads are emotionally
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How could she feel so different and look, largely, the same?
Maybe having a child was like being drunk. You couldn’t gauge when you went from being charming to being an asshole.
Unlike pain, the ache of anticipation gets so deep inside you, it can’t be soothed by adrenaline or shock.
Apollo reached up to pat the cheekbone that had been reconstructed. It would’ve been better to leave the damage visible, at least then his outside would match his inside.
It took a lot of money to make Manhattan feel quaint.
Soon it seemed strange to call this group the Survivors. They were here, but none of them had survived.
Once Patrice shut the door, a passerby would never know—or probably even imagine—that inside a basement apartment in southeastern Queens there lay such a beautifully appointed dinner table. It was like catching a glimpse of the glittering soul inside a rumpled passenger on a subway train.
If our relationships are made of many small lies, they become something larger, a prison of falsehoods.
They would tear each other apart, down to the atomic level, a little nuclear fission in the kitchen, nothing left of them but the silhouettes of who they used to be burned into the wall.
In the time it took him to complete the sentence, Lillian had already opened the fridge and removed a half-carton of eggs, an onion, a block of cheddar cheese, sour cream, and a bag of semisweet chocolate chips. A selection strange enough that Apollo wanted to make a joke, but as she removed more items from the fridge—tangerines and cherry tomatoes—he realized how anxious she must be. They’d seen each other at his trial but hadn’t been allowed to talk. He’d called her from Rikers once, but this was the first time they’d been in the same room since then.
In a way it felt good to have someone to care for.
Lillian gave a smile. Her purse sat on the table. She reached for it, unzipped the top, took out her phone, and swiped once on the screen. She held the phone toward him. “I called an Uber,” she said. “How much did that cost you?” He’d taken that scolding tone adults do with their elderly parents. Lillian’s face flushed, and she set the phone down. “I called an Uber,” she said. “And now I’m here. Let’s leave it at that.”
Good mothers are a gift,
“I’d offer to buy you a new bed,” she said. “But that Uber ride took most of my savings.”
Apollo thought giving Patrice and Dana the book had been a selfless gesture, but it’s possible he couldn’t be trusted to understand himself right now. What would he have done if Lillian hadn’t been here? He didn’t know, and that surprised him. Who was he now? What might he become? He’d always been so sure—a book man, a husband, a father—but now none of those roles seemed his to fill.
That slow time when their child had existed in two worlds at once—reality and eternity—and because Apollo and Emma were both in contact with the boy right then, they too, in a sense, had slipped between the two. The entire family had been Here and There. Together. A fairy tale moment, the old kind, when such stories were meant for adults, not kids.
Apollo stood in the semidarkness of this room and felt much the same. If he reached out now, he thought he’d even feel the thin membrane in the air like a curtain he might part. Here and There.
Wheeler nodded and grinned as one does when learning about something one will never try.
Every human being is a series of stories; it’s nice when someone wants to hear a new one.
But when he looked around, he could still see the old platforms, and down on the street level, the old Jamaica, Queens. If his mother had been with him, would she have seen a third Jamaica, the one she first encountered when she was a young immigrant in the United States? How many Jamaicas might there be? If you were a thousand years old, you’d remember when all this was marshland, and Jamaica Avenue was the Old Rockaway Trail used by the Rockaway and Canarsie Indians. And before that? In the 1800s city workers dredging the bottom of nearby Baisley Pond found the remains of an American
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What had he been worrying about twenty minutes earlier? Fucking witches? Why worry over witches when the Internet could conjure so much worse?
“Not months but years. Decades. A man who lives alone for that long forgets what it’s like to be civilized. He starts walking around his house in nothing but ratty underwear. Then one day he steps out to get the mail in that underwear and doesn’t even notice. Then he’s out on his porch in some saggy-ass boxer shorts and no T-shirt and is surprised when people think he looks like a troll.”
But maybe it was too late. Or she didn’t want to go back in time. Not with me.
Apollo felt, viscerally, why ancient people stood in awe before mountains and glaciers. To strain your neck, looking up that high, and realize you weren’t seeing all of it, couldn’t see all of it. The instinct to worship overcame him, and he lowered his head until they’d passed under the bridge.
There are no secrets anymore. Vampires can’t come into your house unless you invite them. Posting online is like leaving your front door open and telling any creature of the night it can enter.”
A bad fairy tale has some simple goddamn moral. A great fairy tale tells the truth.”
Hundreds of years ago German peasants were asking one another this question. But rather than frame it as a question they turned it into a story that embodied the concern. How do we protect our children? It’s 2015, and we’re still trying to find an answer. The new fears are the old fears, and the old fears are ancient.”
Apollo listened to the children. The screeching frustration of the girl on the scooter. The monkey cries of two boys wrestling over a yellow ball. The taunting and whining, the cooing and cackling. Children. Glorious and half wild. He nearly fainted from the beauty of them.
“People call us witches,” Cal said quickly. She grabbed Apollo’s hand. “But maybe what they’re really saying is that we were women who did things that seemed impossible. You remember those old stories about mothers who could lift cars when their kids were trapped underneath? I think of it like that. When you have to save the one you love, you will become someone else, something else. You will transform. The only real magic is the things we’ll do for the ones we love.
‘We can be heroes,’ ” Patrice said. “But heroes like us don’t get to make mistakes.”
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
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Instinctively he checked his coat for his wallet, but it had been lost. No ATM card, no credit cards, no driver’s license. He had ceased to exist in any modern sense. Or more precisely, he had lost access to nearly his entire modern existence. The only totem left was his phone.
“Joe,” he said. “Here in the United States everyone calls me Joe. In America your name must be convenient or it must be changed.”
People can choose ignorance, can’t they? Life is easier in blinders. In my old age now I have time to wonder about such things though. Even if you choose to ignore the truth, the truth still changes you.”
But let me tell you what I see instead. The neediness of it. The begging to be applauded. As if the praise of a thousand strangers would ever make up for the fact that you didn’t feel loved enough as a child.
She’d pegged him hard and hadn’t hesitated. What had he been expecting, hugs and heartfelt kisses? Maybe so. Maybe so. But reconciliation never came easy, not with the things that mattered.
“ ‘You’re what’s wrong with our family,’ ” Emma said. “ ‘You. Are. The. Problem. Go take another pill.’ Those were the last words you said to me.” Apollo lowered his head. “I—” She spoke over him. “That’s the first time you took my light from me.”
The world is full of glamour, especially when it obscures the suffering of the weak.
They made love until they fucked. They fucked until they were spent.
“I spent my whole life chasing him,” he said. “But you’re the one who was always there.” “I was where I wanted to be,” she whispered.
Emma finally spoke. “I’m not saying that. I’m saying I was on my own and keeping Brian alive, keeping myself alive, working on Jorgen day and night, and it was killing me, Apollo. You saw me, didn’t you? I wasn’t able to do it because I was so powerful, I was able to do it because I had no other choice. I had to do it alone, so I did. But now I don’t have to do it alone. At least I hope I don’t. We could be stronger together, but that means you have to help me. Can you do that? Will you?”
What lengths will people stretch to believe they’re still good?
