William didn’t consult his device this time. He could recite the history from memory.
“North Brother Island remained uninhabited until 1885, when Riverside Hospital was established to treat victims of smallpox. In time the hospital treated victims of other quarantinable diseases. After World War II, the island became housing for war veterans. And in the fifties it became a treatment center for drug addicts, though it eventually closed because of corruption among the staff.”
William moved the phone’s spotlight over the hydrant.
“In that time the hospital grew to include the original treatment center, a library, dorms for the staff, a chapel, a foundry, a stockhouse and a coal storage house, a doctor’s cottage, a recreation center, and a morgue. It even had sidewalks and roads.”
Apollo and William didn’t realize it, but they were already walking on concrete, only inches below the overgrowth. North Brother Island housed a small town that had been reclaimed by the earth. If it had been daylight, they would’ve already spotted a few of the larger derelict buildings, but for now those were camouflaged by the night and vegetation. So they stayed by the fire hydrant, marveling at it as if they’d unearthed a spaceship.
William’s phone beeped twice, faintly, and the flashlight app winked out to save power.
“You really did do your research,” Apollo whispered in the dark.
“I told you, I was on the boat since noon,” William said, straining a bit as he pushed himself up from a crouch. “I had time to read.”
They walked again, using the overgrown hydrant as a sightline. In this way, with a fixed point behind him, Apollo hoped to save them from becoming lost.
Apollo’s footing seemed surer now. He moved closer to William, walking in step but looking ahead.
“Why are you here really?” Apollo asked. “Don’t give me this ‘I just want to help’ bullshit.”
They kicked through the underbrush a few minutes more. Apollo felt himself still reeling from the recent revelations. Lillian, Kim, and now Patrice. If William was only tagging along so he could upload a video of his adventures to his YouTube channel, get a billion hits, and start making money from page views, then Apollo would rather just know it now instead of finding out when someone emailed him a link in a few weeks. At this point he felt so exhausted with people that he wouldn’t even be angry about it. William had at least helped him get here.
“Gretta said no.”
Apollo stopped moving. “Your wife?”
A long, deep sigh from William. “Maybe five years ago she might’ve been charmed. Ten years ago. But now? She told me to keep the book. She didn’t want it.” William went quiet. “If I wasn’t here with you on this island, I’d be at home in my basement going nuts. At least this is something. It’s insane, but at least I’m not alone.”
Apollo stood beside William quietly for a minute or three.
“So can I come with you?” William asked.
“I’m going in here to fuck some shit up. You do whatever you want to do.”
They walked again.
The immediate dangers they faced now were the little pockets of the modern world that had been introduced on the island. An open utility shaft, for instance, could send them falling twenty feet in the dark. A portion of a brick wall might choose that moment to collapse, hidden within creeping vines right up until it crushed them.
“You see lights over that way?” Apollo asked.
Firelight, not electric light. To the south and floating in the air.
“Will-o’-the-wisp,” William said softly, watching them, too.
Apollo’s eyes adjusted to the sight, and he realized he was seeing a small fire burning on the second floor of a two-story building. The entire wall facing Apollo had fallen away long ago, so it was like looking inside a diorama. He couldn’t see anyone by the fire, but who else could have set it? Emma. Surviving alone on this island all this time. He never expected he’d actually find her. Nervous electricity shot down the back of his skull. If he was honest, it was the same charge he’d felt before their first date. In a moment William and Apollo were no longer walking together. Apollo Kagwa broke into a run.
BY 1981 THE smallpox patients had been long gone from North Brother Island. The war veterans evacuated, the drug addicts no longer treated there. The island became known only as a nesting colony for the black-crowned night heron. Smallish, unassuming-looking birds that spend hours and hours clicking at each other, then stumble into asthmatic squawking when the mood hits. The night herons ruled the island for over twenty years, but in the early part of the twenty-first century, they abandoned it. The reason for their departure remained unknown, a bit of birder curiosity at best, nothing news making.
Tonight Apollo Kagwa discovered why the black-crowned night herons had left. They’d been displaced.
Women and children had returned to North Brother Island.
They weren’t in the Tuberculosis Pavilion, the largest and still most structurally sound edifice on the island. Instead they’d moved into the Nurses’ Residence, a four-story U-shaped Gothic Revival building large enough to house 125 nurses when it was completed in 1904. Natural forces destroyed the windows long ago, but the women and children had begun repairs. Apollo could see firelight licking and flickering against the clear plastic that had been thrown up in the window frames. The building he’d seen from a distance still carried that fire on the second floor, but now it looked more like a signal light than a dwelling, a fixed point that would help people make their way back to this place. Base camp.
Apollo stood at the edge of a cleared courtyard. Across it stood the Nurses’ Residence, next to that the Doctor’s Cottage, the building with a fallen facade. In the near-darkness, Apollo could make out some people. Women moved in pairs or alone between the two buildings. Here and there children peeked out at the night through the clear plastic windowpanes. He might as well have stumbled across a village in the American wilderness back in 1607.
How could all this be happening so close to New York City? Apollo’s apartment lay less than four miles from this exact spot. A short boat ride had landed him on the shores of an island out of a fairy tale. He watched these women and children with a sense of awe that bordered on terror.
Apollo didn’t bother to consult William about what to do next. He didn’t even consult himself. He walked out of the shadows and into the courtyard. He just stepped out into the open.
This isn’t to say he was fearless. Actually he could hardly breathe because of the hiccupping breaths rising up in his constricted throat. To calm down, he talked to himself. The mantra. If he said it enough times he might believe it.
“I am the god, Apollo,” he whispered.
He spoke so softly he hardly even heard himself.
“I am the god Apollo,” he said, louder now.