Our Hearts. Chapter Fifteen. Leo

The pain began with the collapse of geometry.

The bunker walls lost their right angles and began to run like heated gray wax, dripping thick cement sap onto the melting floor, and in this viscous, formless stifling heat, at the very bottom of the melting universe, only she remained. Imani.

She was above him. And inside him. Right under his skin—there, in the narrow, feverish space between the epidermis and the fascia, where nerve endings turn into bare, thrashing wires. Archaic, smooth, wet with venomous sweat, smelling of the forest, earth, wild honey, and the caramel char of Leo’s own blood, heated from within to the boiling point. She didn’t just press him into the coarse palm-fiber mat—she was sprouting into him, feeling for roots among his ribs.

Leo threw his head back as her lips touched his collarbone. And then her teeth parted and sank into his body. It was like the bite of a beast and the kiss of a lover at the same time. It was a surgically precise, ritualistic puncture. An opening of the human shell. And beneath that shell was him—Gonzalez.

He screamed—soundlessly, arching his back, lifting his shoulder blades off the floor—when her nails, hard and long as black obsidian scalpels, carved four deep furrows across his chest. It seemed as though the skin on his body began to open. Like an overripe fruit bursting from the heat. Like a night-blooming flower unfurling. Without a crunch, without a tear—quietly, wetly, inevitably. Blood gushed from the cuts—first bright scarlet, pulsating, and then—thick, dark, pomegranate-colored, with the characteristic suffocating smell of enzymes.

But Leo’s blood did not stain her thighs. It burst outward in brown ropes that changed their nature in mid-air. Hemoglobin turned into chlorophyll, plasma into concentrated plant sap, erythrocytes into tiny, writhing buds. Like wet, vibrating vines, his own venous system crawled across his ribs, sprouting shoots, suckers, and tendrils. Real, succulent stems grew from his open chest with bright, emerald leaves smelling of rotting wood and tropical rain. These rhizomes wrapped around Imani’s wrists, reaching for the vanishing ceiling, blossoming with black, radioactive buds and white flowers smelling of gardenia.

“Ne tanga motema…” she whispered into his bare collarbone. The voice was deep, guttural, vibrating in her ribcage and transferring into his bones through the tangle of exposed flesh. “Don’t close your heart…”

And those drops of blood that, rolling down and turning into nectar, suddenly stumbled upon the darkness, changed color. They became absolutely black, like the color of ancient uraninite from the underground tunnels of Katanga. And from each black drop, with a soft, fleshy pop, shadows hatched.

Leo felt his venous channels fill with the weight of radiating pitchblende—the same resinous ore that, in the 1940s, half-naked, nameless miners of Shinkolobwe carried on their backs in woven baskets, so that later it could incinerate Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His bone marrow became uranium-238, slowly, with a half-life of billions of years, slipping through radium and polonium to stable, dead lead-206. The radionuclide decay emitted alpha particles directly into his thoughts.

He fell through layers of Precambrian shales, through dolomites and copper veins, the back of his head brushing against the fossilized bones of the first hominids who had once straightened their backs on this plateau. It seemed the very vector of evolution had looped upon itself: the virus did not bring death; it returned his flesh to the primordial proto-matter, to that prehistoric suspension where a uranium atom first met the first organic molecule…

Shadows. They grew. They shivered and burst.

Bats.

Huge, blind fruit bats covered in ichor hatched right out of his torn veins, like chicks from a shell: wet, frantically flapping their underdeveloped membranes. A moment later, their leathery wings spread, and the creatures, with vile, piercing squeaks, soared up and down, plastering Leo’s body in a rustling, living mantle, turning him into their own nest. They beat him on the eyelids, on the lips, burying their blunt gray muzzles into his neck and the corners of his mouth, clawing at the meat, drinking his fear. They kissed him with hundreds of blind, trembling mouths.

Flap-flap-flap.

The sound of leathery wings grew louder, became rhythmic, and faltered, until it turned into the steady crackle of an old movie projector.

The clatter of film. A dusty, smoke-filled beam of light cutting through the gloom of the “San Martin” cinema in Boston. Winter.

Leo is seventeen. He is sitting in a cool, sagging velvet seat in the penultimate row. His father is no longer next to him—his father stayed home, by the stove, silently staring at a brass cezve and watching the snow that didn’t touch the ground. The seat to Leo’s left is empty, like a gaping hole in his own ribcage.

On the screen, Alan Parker was murdering a human soul. “Angel Heart”. Mickey Rourke was walking through New Orleans, amid stagnant water, dead chickens, and mud. The music flowed thick, like congealed syrup. The ceiling fan on the screen spun, slicing the air into chunks. Leo stared at the screen, but the celluloid was melting, and there, in a macabre sepia haze, he didn’t see Harry Angel. He saw himself. His own lost eyes, convinced they were investigating someone else’s crime—and not knowing that the evil was already inside, already in the blood, already on page fourteen of the CONADEP report.

And across from him, in a puddle of sacrificial plasma, danced Epiphany Proudfoot. Dark skin, white dress, thirst, flesh. Lisa Bonet looked out from the screen and smiled—and it was the smile of Imani from the bar in Kinshasa.

But the film jerked, slipped off the reel, the frame flipped, and the roles swapped. Suddenly, like in a ruined projection. Now Imani was Harry—with a knife in her pocket, walking down dark streets. And Leo was Epiphany—tied to a bloody bed, soft, dark, open, suffocating with terror. And looking down at him from above, with the eyes of Louis Cyphre, was she, peeling a boiled egg with her long black fingers, devouring his soul piece by piece.

“I know who you are,” she whispered from the screen, and the sound rustled in his own ear canals.

The camera on the screen moved in close to the backs of the audience’s heads. Leo looked back. In the last row, two seats away from him, sat his grandfather—Hector Gonzalez Herrera. A tired face, thin white lips. Eyes—two cold, glass buttons sewn into wrinkled skin. His grandfather didn’t move, but his words resonated directly in Leo’s cerebellum, drowning out the clatter of the film:

“If you don’t do it, Leo, they will do it to you.”

The clatter of the “San Martin” projector merged with the crackle of the dosimeter in the barracks, which in turn bled into the dry, rhythmic clacking of the Olivetti typewriter on which, in Buenos Aires in the seventies, the lists of the desaparecidos—the missing—were compiled.

Clack-clack-clack. Ding. Zzzzip.

Every letter struck into the thick paper by his grandfather echoed with gunshots at “The Farm” and the boiling of copper-cobalt emulsion in his liver. His tongue lost the ability to distinguish taste and sound: the lead of the target smelled of Charlotte’s fresh peach perfume, and her treacherous whisper possessed the colorimetric density of thorium dissolved in nitric acid. All the names he knew, he remembered—Harry, Epiphany, Louis, Simon—sifted through Imani’s fingers like fine, prickly sand from the bottom of the dried-up Congo River…

Her nails dug into his back again, tearing the skin off him along with the Boston memories. Sharp, precise, inexorable, they carved paths from his shoulder blades all the way to his ribs.

The smell of the old cinema was replaced by the sickeningly sweet stench of spilled Budweiser beer, cheap marijuana, falling autumn leaves of Cambridge, and peach perfume.

Austin. Or Cambridge. Freshman year. Leo is nineteen, walking heavily, drunkenly up the wooden stairs of the frat house, holding onto the sticky railing. The bass from the speakers on the first floor pounded in his chest, dull and rhythmic—exactly like a second heart that hadn’t yet grown, but was already casting a shadow. A hot premonition of disaster lodged in his throat. He was walking after his future. After Charlotte. He had carried her name on the tip of his tongue for the last three months: white skin, blonde hair, brown eyes, their first kiss between the bookshelves of molecular biology.

The room on the second floor. The door is ajar.

Leo pushed it open.

Charlotte was on the bed. Above her, Simon moved—heavy, animalistic, and rhythmic—a broad-shouldered bastard from the lacrosse team. Their bodies intertwined like the writhing vines in his own chest. Leo stood in the doorway, paralyzed by the sight of sweaty, alien labor. He heard the wet slaps of flesh, saw Charlotte’s pale fingers digging into an unfamiliar freckled back.

She turned her head. Her eyes—empty, glassy—met his gaze.

“Leo…” she said quietly, but the voice didn’t belong to her. It was Imani’s voice: “Don’t be afraid…”

And Simon calmly turned his face toward him. And beneath his mop of red hair, Leo saw the lifeless, parchment face of his grandfather. The ice-cold buttons of his eyes stared with a dead squint:

“The world is a slaughterhouse, Leo. If you don’t do it…”

Bang! The whipping slaps of bodies instantly morphed into the measured roar of gunshots.

Rat-tat-tat.

The smell of beer and betrayal was burned away by the sharp, sulfurous scent of cordite and wet Virginia pine.

“The Farm.” The thick, milky fog of the Camp Peary training grounds. Leo lay in the watery mud of the shooting lane, squeezing the blued metal of the rifle in his wet fingers. He is twenty-two. The stock is jammed into his shoulder.

“Shift fire! Double tap to the body, one to the head!” The ruthless voice of his father battered his eardrums worse than the recoil. There was no malice in it, no love—only the cold geometry of liquidation. “Count to three! On ‘three’—fire! Don’t think, Leo! The target is just meat and physics!”

Leo pulled the trigger. One. Two. Three. The plywood silhouette in the distance jerked and slumped.

And to the side, in the shadow of a glaucous Virginia pine, sat grandfather Hector on a folding chair. In an immaculate raincoat, holding a cane whose knob gleamed in the fog.

“Kill first, Leo,” the old man rustled, and the sound of his voice deafened the roar of the assault rifles. “Kill before they open their mouths. Hurt them before they get to your skin.”

Another target popped out of the fog on rails. Leo raised the barrel, his finger pressing against the iron on its own, but suddenly the target gained volume. It wasn’t rubber or plywood. It was Imani. Or Charlotte. Or himself—in the light-gray suit of a field medic.

Leo screamed, trying to tear his finger from the trigger, but a cramp seized his hand. The rifle thrashed in his grip, spitting bullet after bullet into the familiar body. But instead of blood, the same black fruit bats burst from the target’s shattered chest. They rushed back along the bullet trajectories—straight at Leo, crashing into his face, clogging his mouth, nostrils, and ears with wet membranes.

Vines sprouted from beneath the soil of Virginia, breaking his grandfather’s cane, wrapping around his father’s legs, dragging them both into the rotting, radioactive earth of Upper Katanga. Leo choked, coughed, and tiny, trembling winged shadows flew out of his own throat along with the air.

Imani was lying on top of him.

Her body—supple, scalding, soaked in sweat—pinned him completely to the mat. Her lips sank into his lips, her tongue—hard, rough, strong—swept across his palate, across his ribs, licking away the flowing blood. The pain from her teeth was so blinding that it destroyed the very concept of suffering, turning into a ringing, monstrous ecstasy.

Imani was drinking his past—the cowardly Charlotte, the cold father, the dead grandfather with his glass eyes, the smell of the old cinema, and the gunpowder fumes of “The Farm.” She chewed up his fears, replacing them with her own dark, chthonic essence.

Leo felt how, at the very center of this orgasm of decay, his two hearts—the human and the viral—stopped beating out of sync. The second heart no longer needed to grow like a nodule under the skin. It hadn’t stopped—it had dissolved, pouring itself into the first. They merged into one. Two pulses forged into a single, incredible piston.

A single beat.

It was so powerful that the plywood of the targets, Parker’s film, the Virginia fog, and the bunker’s concrete walls disintegrated into dust.

A sharp, deep breath.

Silence crashed down on him like a slab dropping onto water.

No bats. No vines. No gunshots.

Leo opened his eyes.

The light filtering through the dried, cracked boards of the window was no longer morning light—it was thick, amber, mid-afternoon. The ceiling—low, concrete, with the familiar saltpeter stains and a crack along which a small spider crawled. The smell—sterilely clean, with a faintly perceptible note of charred wood and fresh coffee.

He was lying on the floor, on the stiff palm-fiber mat.

He was entirely naked.

Leo sat up slowly. There was no dizziness. The nausea, the ache in his joints, the sensation of crushed glass in his lungs—everything had vanished. His body felt surprisingly whole, filled with a taut, ringing, yet absolutely obedient strength.

He looked down at his chest. His hands instinctively ran over his ribs, expecting to feel jagged wounds, torn meat, or flexible stems.

There was no blood. There were no vines.

But the skin was marked. On his collarbones, on his shoulders, along his ribs—where in his delirium the vines had torn out and teeth had sunken in—glowed faint, delicate pinkish crescents. Nail marks. Light, superficial bite prints. They were not bleeding; they throbbed with a dull, affectionate warmth—like physical proof that her touches had been real while his mind soared over abysses. The dense pearlescent nodules under his skin had completely dissolved.

Leo pressed his fingers to his sternum, freezing in anticipation.

Inside, steadily, deeply, and terrifyingly, like the engine of an ocean liner, beat a single, unified pulse. Sixty-two beats per minute. No extrasystoles. No hydraulic strikes. Nothing else. Just a heart. Just a pulse.

Voices drifted in from the street, through the warped door. The sound reached him with crystalline clarity—as if the concrete walls had thinned to tissue paper.

“…was it worth it?” It was Ilunga’s voice. Hollow, vibrating with barely contained tension.

“I did what I had to do,” Imani’s voice sounded steady, like the flow of a deep river on a plain.

“He is an outsider, Imani.”

“He is not an outsider anymore, Ilunga.”

Leo rose from the mat. His muscles rolled beneath his skin smoothly, like a predator’s after a long hibernation. In the corner lay his olive-green mercenary uniform. He pulled on the trousers, buttoned the shirt. The fabric glided over the fresh marks on his body, causing a light, thrilling tingle. Tying the laces on his high boots, he cast a glance at his right wrist.

The copper bracelet was warm. Alive.

Leo pushed open the heavy wooden door and stepped out from the bunker’s twilight into the blinding, scorching glare of the Congolese day.

Imani sat in the shade, at a makeshift table fashioned from an old stump. She wore the same worn-out jeans and a men’s shirt with rolled-up sleeves. Her hair was slightly damp from sweat, her face tired but remarkably bright. She looked at him the way one looks at a person who has returned from an incredibly long journey: without superfluous words, with pure recognition.

Nearby, by the concrete water cistern, stood Ilunga, his hands shoved into his pockets. His face remained inscrutable, but in his heavy gaze there was no longer the old, blatant distrust. Only the acknowledgment of a fact: he survived.

The ground beneath Leo’s boots felt to him—for the first time in all these days—not alien. The clay was not an enemy. The jungle around them was not a prison.

He walked up to Imani.

She didn’t embrace him, nor did she ask questions. She simply picked up an enameled mug from a protruding stump nearby and handed it to him.

Coffee. Black, strong, with a velvety bitterness.

Leo took the mug. Took a sip. The bitterness burned his tongue, flowing down his esophagus, filling the residual emptiness in his chest.

And in that dense bitterness there was no longer any Boston, or “The Farm”, or Charlotte, or the dead eyes of his grandfather.

There was only this earth. Only this day. And only her.

Chapter Sixteen. Target Trajectory →
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