The Changeling

by Victor LaValle

“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.”