Flushing is the setting for a pivotal return to Apollo Kagwa’s childhood in the fall of 1989. At twelve, he is a junior high school student at IS 237, living with Lillian Kagwa after the family has legally shed the surname West; an ordinary afternoon in the neighborhood leads him home to an uncanny recurrence of an old dream.

Setting and family history

By the fall of 1989, Apollo is legally a Kagwa. After Brian West disappeared, Lillian reverted to her maiden name and ensured that her son did the same, a deliberate break with the name West and the life associated with it. Flushing is thus more than the backdrop to Apollo’s school years: it is where he grows up within the new family identity his mother established.

An afternoon in the neighborhood

The account locates Apollo’s routine in the everyday spaces around home. He spends a few quarters playing Galaga at a nearby diner, buys quarter waters and chips at a bodega, then joins a game of running bases on Colden Street. After playing for an hour or three, he returns to the apartment and turns on the shower.

The familiar sequence changes when heavy knocking comes from the far end of the apartment. As steam spreads from the bathroom into the hall, Apollo recognizes the scene as resembling a dream he had repeatedly as a very young child: knocking at the door, running water, and an apartment filled with fog. He runs toward the front door, but the knocking stops as he nears it. Flushing’s ordinary neighborhood geography—diner, bodega, street, apartment—therefore carries him from an unremarkable afternoon into a disturbing encounter with a memory he had not understood as his own until then.