Jorgen didn’t leave time for a response. He brought one hand to the collar of his shirt. He undid the top two buttons and pulled back the fabric. A bright red vertical scar appeared near the base of his throat, hardly healed.
“I did this two months ago. I hit a vein, but not the artery. I bled a lot but only gave myself a real sore throat. The doctors prescribed the Ensure because I can’t eat solid food. I add the liquor to wash it down. That’s a family prescription. It’s called Brennivín. Went to the ICU, but I was back home in four days. I couldn’t even sleep while I was in Jamaica Hospital. Not even with the sedatives. I heard her all that time, even there. I know she will never forgive me.”
Now Jorgen slipped into the seat across from Apollo.
“You stole our son.” The words so low, they hardly registered.
“No,” Jorgen said. “Not me. I’m too old.” He looked up at the ceiling. “But when I was younger, yes, I did my service.”
“Service,” Apollo repeated. The word singed his tongue.
Jorgen set both hands flat on the tabletop. The man had been so commanding as he prepared the meal. Sitting like this, though, across the table in a kitchen with linoleum floors and cheap particleboard cupboards, he settled into his age and his drunkenness and his tortured feelings. He seemed to decline right in front of Apollo.
“I want you to see the living room,” he said. “No point in trying to avoid it anymore.” He looked at the pots on the oven and nodded faintly. “She won’t appear without an offering so there’s no point in rushing.”
He set his hands on the table and pushed himself up.
Apollo slid out from his seat and peeked into the boiling pot. The sheep’s head had shifted so it grinned right up at him. He followed Jorgen out of the kitchen. He held the utility knife.
JORGEN LED APOLLO out of the kitchen and across the hallway. The old man opened the door to a den and stepped in. He waved for Apollo to follow. Jorgen’s den had a rectangular shape, as long as the kitchen and dining room combined. The floor had that hideous blue shag carpeting too, and the walls were painted a very faint yellow. It was an almost nauseating combination of colors. Add to that how much hotter this room felt. The dining room had been chilly and the kitchen warm because of the oven, but this room practically boiled. Bad enough that Apollo had to undo his jacket and take off his knit cap. He felt like that sheep’s skull, dropped into a pot.
There were three space heaters on the floor, in a row along one of the walls, all three on the highest setting. They were the kind Patrice and Dana had used in their basement apartment, the kind Apollo recognized from his childhood. They looked like enormous toaster ovens. Each had a grillwork facade and behind it coils that ran bright orange. If they were left on for hours, they tended to rattle and give off a static buzzing. The three space heaters in the den were doing exactly that now—rattling and buzzing. Jorgen had been running them a long time.
The den was divided in half—lengthwise—by two tall black Japanese folding wall panels. The shitty, black lacquered kind, the type sold in only the bleakest of neighborhoods. Eight panels all together, a series of outstretched cherry blossom designs. With both fully extended, Apollo couldn’t see what hid on the other side of the den. On this side: the three space heaters on the ground, Jorgen, and a small handful of framed pictures hung on the wall, hovering a few feet above the heaters. Apollo couldn’t make out the images from here in the doorway.
Jorgen walked closer to those framed pictures, but Apollo stayed still. He felt a whiff of cool air and looked to his right. Down the long hallway he saw the front door of Jorgen’s home. It remained wide open. Winter air free to sneak inside. Apollo had the urge to walk down there and shut the door, but then Jorgen began talking.
“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.”
Jorgen grinned at Apollo and waved for him once more. He gestured to the photos hung on the wall.
Apollo finally approached. But since he wasn’t a fool he peeked behind the Japanese panels. No one there. Only the same blue shag carpet on the ground. There were no space heaters on that side. The long wall showed many more framed photos, all hung up. A hundred pictures, maybe more. It put Apollo in mind of a family album. Instead of collecting them in a book, they were spread across this wall. He could see they were pictures of people, but before he could focus, Jorgen came for him.
“Please, Apollo.” Jorgen touched his arm.
Apollo turned. How had the old man come so close so quickly? It was this damn shag carpeting, muffling sound.
Apollo came back around the Japanese panels. Only as he did this did Apollo realize something strange about the den. There weren’t any windows. How was that possible, in a one-family house that stood on a detached plot? The dining room had windows that faced out onto the street. The kitchen looked out onto the small backyard. But this den faced only inward.
Jorgen brought Apollo back to the framed photos on this wall, the ones hanging right above those three space heaters. The machines sent heat along Apollo’s legs.
“I told you about the first immigrant,” Jorgen said. “Now let me tell you about some more recent ones.” He raised one hand and tapped at the largest picture here, a framed rendering of a ship at sea.