“I am the god, Apollo” mantra

The “I am the god, Apollo” mantra is Apollo Kagwa’s private answer to moments when other people’s judgments threaten to define him. First formed amid the racial suspicion he encounters as a teenage bookseller, it turns into a practiced assertion of power: one he carries into an intimate decision with Emma Valentine, repeats almost automatically when he is kept waiting outside a home, and invokes while returning to work after Brian’s birth. The words can make Apollo feel divine, but they do not make prejudice or uncertainty disappear. Their importance lies in that tension between the force of the declaration and the limits of what it can change.

Origin Under Scrutiny

As a teenager, Apollo Kagwa builds a book-selling concern and introduces himself to dealers while carrying a pack of magazines and books. Some booksellers mentor him, teaching him how to value books, navigate estate sales, and find places to sell at antique shows. Others respond to his stock with suspicion, accusing him of having stolen it. At some higher-end Manhattan shops, Apollo waits outside while employees ignore him; at one point, he may stand at the entrance for fifteen minutes without being let in.

The narrative places these refusals in a racist climate associated with the shooting of Black boys by Bernhard Goetz and the white people who cheered him. Apollo is treated as threatening even when he is a boy with glasses and a backpack full of books. The humiliation becomes more than a practical obstacle to selling: it makes him wonder whether he really is frightening, a monster capable of driving away his own father. The mantra begins at the point where external suspicion threatens to become his own conviction.

Apollo repeats the words while standing before shopkeepers who judge him. The repeated first-person declaration gives him a counter-image to the monster he fears he might be. He may have dreamed it up himself, the narration suggests, or perhaps it came from an old memory; its origin remains uncertain. What is clear is its immediate purpose: to help him endure the shame and self-loathing that flare when the world appears to confirm his worst fear. The affirmation can make him feel “downright divine,” but the locked doors remain locked. Its psychological effect and its lack of power over other people are established together.

A Rehearsed Claim to Power

The mantra recurs when Apollo and Emma leave together after a date. He takes Emma Valentine’s hand, she squeezes it, and he raises the possibility of her trip to Brazil. As he asks whether she might stay, he silently repeats the words. The sequence links the mantra to a moment when he is emotionally exposed: he wants Emma to remain, but her choice is hers. His self-address does not settle the outcome; it accompanies the risk of asking and the uncertainty that follows.

A later encounter gives the assertion a more forceful, outward consequence. Emma tells Apollo Valentine about the red string she wears and her belief that its wishes will come true only when it falls off naturally. Apollo Kagwa takes her hand, picks up a plastic knife, and cuts the string from her wrist. Just before acting, he repeats the mantra to himself; afterward, he promises that all three of her wishes will come true with him. The scene makes confidence and presumption difficult to separate. The narration explicitly frames Emma as having to decide whether his action proves arrogance or boldness. The mantra accompanies Apollo’s move, but it cannot make Emma’s decision for her.

The Words Become Automatic

Years later, at thirty-seven, Apollo Kagwa arrives at a two-story row house in Ridgewood. A woman calls from inside; locks click, and a curtain shifts so someone can see him without being seen. Then a deeper male voice sounds, and the door stops being unlocked. The house’s partial opening and renewed closure recall Apollo’s earlier waits outside nervous booksellers’ shops and private homes. The mantra returns in response to this familiar threshold, but its function has changed: Apollo thinks it automatically, as commonplace as breathing.

That automatic recurrence suggests how thoroughly an improvised defense has become part of Apollo’s habits. The adult encounter does not reproduce the exact circumstances of his teenage selling, but the withholding of entry revives their emotional pattern. He takes out his cellphone and texts Emma Valentine that he will be late for dinner. The mantra helps mark the old feeling as it surfaces; it does not prevent the delay, open the door, or remove the need to wait. The repetition shows both endurance and the persistence of the vulnerability it was meant to answer.

Fatherhood, Work, and the Mantra’s Limits

After Brian’s birth, the mantra enters a new setting. Well after midnight, Apollo Kagwa wakes and leaves the bedroom, finds the bag he carried on the night Brian was born, and takes out a copy of Fields of Fire. In the kitchen, he opens his laptop and emails a collector in Virginia, attaching a photograph of the book’s cover. As he begins the task, he whispers the mantra; within half an hour, he has fallen asleep at the table.

The scene connects the affirmation to Apollo’s return to work while also placing that work inside the exhaustion of new parenthood. The book, saved in the bag from the night of Brian’s birth, brings his professional life into the domestic aftermath of the birth. The whispered words accompany action rather than a confrontation with a shopkeeper or a declaration to Emma: Apollo gets to work, then sleep overtakes him. The small, concrete ending keeps the mantra from reading as effortless mastery. It can prompt him forward, but it cannot suspend the limits of his body.

Across these episodes, the repeated sentence changes with Apollo’s circumstances while preserving its central contradiction. It answers racialized judgment, supports him through romantic uncertainty, surfaces at a door that may remain closed, and accompanies an exhausted attempt to resume business. Its godlike self-image is not proof that Apollo controls the world around him. Rather, repetition supplies a countervoice when exclusion, dependence, or uncertainty threatens to overwhelm his sense of himself. The mantra’s recurrence makes resilience visible without mistaking resilience for invulnerability.