Forest Hills is both a recognizable residential neighborhood and a threshold in Apollo Kagwa’s search: Patrice directs him to 124 86th Road, and the journey there brings him from the wooded interior of Forest Park to Jorgen Knudsen’s house. The contrast between ordinary homes and the forest’s buried histories makes the neighborhood a hinge between the city’s visible present and the old, concealed story beneath it.

Setting and urban edges

Forest Hills lies in Queens borough, where Apollo encounters a landscape that shifts between settled residential blocks and the extensive wilderness of Forest Park. On the approach to the park, the route passes Slocum Crescent, Olive Place, Groton Street, Harrow Street, Ingram Street, Juno Street, Loubet Street, and Manse. After Metropolitan Avenue, Apollo notices a change in the built environment: Tudor brick gives way to detached colonial houses, then to aluminum siding, a transition that continues toward Union Turnpike. The changing streetscape makes the walk feel like passage into another region, even though it remains within the borough.

At the northeastern edge of Forest Park, the Northern Forest occupies more than five hundred acres. Its thick growth can make the densely populated city feel remote and historically distant. The forest is not an isolated wilderness detached from the surrounding neighborhood; Apollo reaches its perimeter by walking through residential Queens, and later leaves the trees for the sidewalks that lead him toward 86th Road. Forest Hills therefore marks a passage between two kinds of concealment: the shelter of dense woodland and the opacity of suburban houses with drawn blinds.

The search for Emma and the route to 86th Road

Apollo comes to Forest Hills while searching for Emma and following a separate lead about William Wheeler. After spending the night in the park, he searches for Emma at the Carousel and the George Seuffert, Sr., Bandshell, places that might offer shelter from the weather. He walks until midday without finding her. Inside the thickest parts of the Northern Forest, the city seems capable of falling away; he can imagine himself in a remote past, while remaining only a short distance from the surrounding urban population.

By noon Apollo gives up the search in the forest and heads toward 86th Road with his suitcase. Patrice has supplied the address, 124 86th Road, and identified its resident as Jorgen Knudsen. The clue comes from the boat that William had used: Patrice checked the vessel’s registration and found it attached to Jorgen’s name. He suspects William had obtained access to the boat improperly, but believes its registered owner may know where William is. The address turns Forest Hills into a practical destination in Apollo’s pursuit of information, not merely the next place on a map.

Little Norway and Jorgen’s house

On the way to the address, Apollo passes through Little Norway, a name he had learned from the police who stopped him. In daylight, the neighborhood looks familiar across much of Queens: one-family houses with aluminum siding, parked sedans and minivans, small lawns behind chain-link fences, and window coverings in the homes. The streets could belong to many immigrant neighborhoods, Apollo observes; their flags might differ, while their built forms and successive stages of settlement resemble one another. This ordinary setting gives the name Little Norway a double aspect: it identifies a local place while also pointing toward the Norwegian history Jorgen will recount.

The address leads to a three-story house, one of the largest and oldest on its block. There is no car in the driveway, and yellowing blinds block every window. Apollo knocks at the door, which has no bell, but receives no answer. Across the street, a neighbor watches from behind window treatments that conceal whether the observer is young or old, male or female. Apollo leaves rather than remain conspicuously on the steps, and circles the block while waiting for Jorgen to return.

The wait lasts for hours. Apollo has eaten and drunk nothing since the previous day, and his hunger is so acute that Jorgen’s eventual appearance initially seems unreal. Jorgen carries two large, heavy white plastic bags and walks slowly beneath a streetlamp. Apollo stands in the street until a driver’s repeated honking makes him move; Jorgen looks up but does not appear to recognize him. He continues to the house, climbs the stairs, unlocks the door, and goes inside. Apollo’s long wait thus ends not with an invitation but with an opportunity to follow the old man into the house.

Forest, ice, and buried history

Inside Jorgen’s home, Apollo encounters a den partitioned by tall black folding screens, space heaters, and framed pictures. Jorgen begins by describing the Laurentide ice sheet as the first immigrant to affect Queens, placing the region’s history far earlier than its streets, houses, or human settlements. He recounts a glacier that spread south from Labrador during the Ice Age, reached New York roughly a thousand feet thick, and remained across the area that would become New York City for twenty-five hundred years before warming melted it.

Jorgen then links the region’s later forested landscape to the Norwegian family history he is about to disclose. He says Nils Knudsen brought his wife, Anna Sofie, and Petra Mikkelsdatter to Queens after doubting that the Sloopers’ vessel was large enough to protect his family. Rather than leave with the other immigrants who traveled upstate, the family remained in Queens, which Jorgen describes as farmland with thousands of acres of forest and open land. He presents the wooded terrain and its caves as places where a creature from the natural world could hide. His account makes the contrast between Forest Hills’ houses and Forest Park’s woods more than a change of scenery: the neighborhood’s domestic surface sits beside a landscape in which family memory, migration, and the possibility of a hidden creature converge.