Our Hearts. Chapter One. Blindness

The ceiling fan spun.

Leo lay on his back, motionless, watching the blades—three of them, white, battered, caked with years of orange dust—slice through the stifling air above him with an even, lulling, and terrifying persistence. He saw himself from the outside, from above, with the detached gaze of a stranger: thin sheets crumpled at his damp feet, a bare torso, arms spread wide like a crucified man or someone surrendering to the mercy of a victor—and the fan overhead, inexorable as a stopwatch on a guillotine. The blades swept across the ceiling, carving the peeling plaster into white segments, and each such segment was a separate frame, a separate state of his disintegrating consciousness. Leo lay beneath this invisible editing table, feeling his receptors melt, unable to assemble the disjointed moments into a single sequence.

Three blades. Eight revolutions per second. Twenty-four frames—exactly what the human eye needs for the motionless to become movement, for the dead to come alive, for deceit to masquerade as truth.

He knew this from the movies. In his childhood, in a distant, ghostly New York, his father often took him to small cinemas for retrospectives—Godard, Coppola, Tarkovsky. He, a nine-year-old boy, would sit in a cool, dark hall, inhaling the sweetish scent of worn plush and frayed cinematic reels, watching the screen, and the screen showed him a world where everything was either slower or faster than in real life. In that crack, in that gap between the screen and reality, true cinema existed. There, in “Apocalypse Now”, Martin Sheen lay on a bed exactly like this: a stifling ceiling, a spinning fan, blades, blades, sticky sweat—and then he got up and went to the shower, and the murky water washed Vietnam off him, but in reality, it washed away nothing, leaving the war under his skin.

But the song was different. And Leo was not in Saigon. Leo was in Kinshasa. And no water in the world could wash off what had been left on his skin this morning—there was so much of it that it had already sprouted inside, seeped into his pores, become part of his own biology.

Someone else’s sweat. His own was there too, but it was familiar, dissolved, invisible, like the air you breathe every day since birth. But over it lay another: salty, thin, with that distinct, agonizing aftertaste left on the body not simply by foreign flesh, but by a terrifying intimacy—the kind that is born between the inhale and exhale of another person, when the distance equals zero and you are already losing your mind, no longer knowing where you end and where she begins.

She.

The air in the room—dense, damp, tropical, grown stagnant overnight behind closed wooden shutters—held the spicy scent of a downpour. It had rained all night. Leo heard it through his feverish sleep—or through what seemed like sleep—large, merciless drops drumming on the tin cornice in a rhythm resembling a frantic heartbeat. Now, in the morning, this moisture hung in the room in a thick suspension, settling on the walls, on the cloudy glass, on pale skin, turning everything around into something sticky, alive, breathing in unison. And amid this stifling dampness was another scent, barely perceptible, floral, and absolutely not his: something cloyingly sweet, dark, exotic—not the smell of duty-free perfume or toilet soap—it was the suffocating aroma of a night flower growing in some ancient, rich earth that had never known winter. This scent lingered in the air with a stubbornness that possessed physical weight and a tangible texture.

A bottle stood dark on the nightstand. Local, cheap, with a dirty label whose letters Leo couldn’t make out because they doubled and danced before his eyes: Lotoko—corn vodka distilled in makeshift contraptions on the outskirts, smelling of burnt grain, smoke, and industrial alcohol. Nearby, on the floor, two empty bottles of Primus beer huddled forlornly, while a third, half-full, warm, and flat, stood by the foot of the bed.

Leo turned his head with difficulty. A dent remained on the adjacent pillow. Not his. Where someone’s head had rested until recently, the fabric was wet and smelled of that same intoxicating floral aroma. He leaned in, inhaled this trace, and in that moment a hypnotic pendulum swung inside him—back and forth, back and forth—and he realized with horror that he remembered and didn’t remember at the same time. His memory had turned into a sieve, a leaky colander through which everything rational had drained away, leaving only animal, sensual details: the temperature of a body, the coarseness of short hair pressed against a skull, a scorching whisper, and the music that still rang in his ears.

…Love is blindness…

The song had been playing in the bar. Leo remembered that clearly. The “Le Copacabana” bar—not at all the luxurious one in Rio, but its Congolese namesake, cozy in its squalor, pathetic, charming, with crooked wooden chairs and a bartender who smiled as if smiling were a form of professional courtesy, not a living emotion. The bar was tucked away on Avenue de la Justice, in that district where the Belgian colonial architecture—pompous, with high balconies and peeling stucco—had long ceased to be colonial and had simply become a backdrop for a useless decay, the way a uniform becomes a mere rag once the epaulets are torn off.

Leo had flown into Kinshasa that morning—an exhausting flight from Nairobi via Addis Ababa, fourteen hours in the air and on layovers. By evening, he was already in that peculiar state of half-asleep disorientation when the body has crossed into another time zone, but the brain is stuck somewhere over the ocean, and between them forms a gap, a mental crevice into which everything known as common sense irrevocably falls. He had made it to the “Orient-Express” hotel—cheap but relatively clean, tossed his backpack onto the bed, taken a lukewarm shower with a persistent smell of rust, changed, and went down to the lobby. There, Rémi Gaillard was already waiting for him, declaring categorically: “Let’s go get a drink, Gonzalez. Tomorrow the hell in the red zone begins, but today we still have the right to be human.”

Rémi Gaillard. A Frenchman. An infectious disease specialist. Forty-two years old, or forty-three—he never gave an exact number, the way those who categorically dislike that number never do. Tall, morbidly thin, with a face where eternal fatigue and caustic irony lived side-by-side, like neighbors who hate each other but can’t move apart due to a lack of money. He had been working in the Congo for two years—first in Bukavu, then in Kisangani, now in Kinshasa, coordinating WHO programs. Over those two years, Rémi had grown a shell of that impenetrable, vicious cynicism that comes from looking too long at things that shouldn’t exist in the civilized world and being forced to call them by their names every day.

Divorced. His wife had left six months ago—Leo didn’t know the details, and Rémi didn’t elaborate, but from the way the Frenchman looked at local women—quickly, appraisingly, with a hungry greed hiding behind refined courtesy—it was clear that the wound inside him was still bleeding, and the cynicism was just a dry crust over it.

“To the mission, Gonzalez,” Rémi raised a full shot glass. The tequila was local, nameless, with a sharp smell of baked agave and gasoline.

“To the mission,” Leo clinked glasses with him.

They drank roughly and fast. Tequila into the glass, down the hatch, followed by a gulp of ice-cold, throat-prickling Primus beer. Leo had brought this ritual from Texas, from college, from the days when alcohol was not just a pleasure, but a form of accessible self-destruction. Rémi, however, drank differently: slowly, savoring every sip like a true sommelier, accompanying every shot with a snide comment: “Weak,” “Better than that trash in Bukavu,” “Oh, and this one has an earthy note, as if corn actually had a soul.”

The bar was half full. Local men in bright shirts, women with tall hairstyles, UN expats, a couple of visiting adventurer-tourists, and a gloomy military advisor from Morocco who drank straight whiskey and stared at a single point. From the speakers, taped to the walls with dirty scotch tape, poured a motley musical stream—Lingala, soul, electronic bass—and then, suddenly, without any transition, the speakers spat out a sluggish, rattling sound.

…I don’t want to see…

U2. “Love is Blindness”. Leo instantly recognized the opening bars—that low drone of the keyboards, heavy and viscous like black honey. Something twitched painfully inside him, the way an exposed nerve twitches when an old, forgotten scar is brushed against. A song from the distant past. From that very “San Martin” cinema where he had sat as a teenager, not yet understanding the meaning of all these English words, but feeling with his skin that hopeless, beautiful, enveloping tone that made you want to squeeze your eyes shut and never open them again.

“Which version do you like better?” Rémi turned to him, holding his shot glass so that the dim light from the counter passed through the yellow liquid, painting his fingers the color of old gold. “U2 or Jack White?”

Leo listened to the musical asphyxiation build up. Bono stretched the words, stretched the vowels, and those vowels were viscous, like molasses, like the night air of the Congo.

“Jack White,” Leo answered. “White is more honest. You can feel the destruction in his version.”

Rémi smirked. The smirk was short, crooked, with one corner of his mouth raised—the favorite gesture of a man accustomed to arguing for the sake of the process itself.

“I prefer U2,” the Frenchman snapped. “White is just craftsmanship. Technique. He takes someone else’s pain and turns it into a rock ‘n’ roll tantrum. But U2 is the original. And the original, Gonzalez, always cuts deeper, because it was born in the dark, not under the spotlights.”

Leo wanted to object. He could have said that White didn’t just cover the song—he took it apart like an antique pocket watch to expose the gears, to see the very mechanism of suffering, and in that surgical anatomy, there is a grim honesty that the sentimental original lacks. Leo could have said that, but the tequila had already done its job—it had liquefied his internal boundaries, turning his thoughts into shifting penumbras. And in the next moment, in the huge, grease-covered mirror behind the bottles that reflected the front door, he saw her.

She entered as if this space belonged to her by birthright and had been waiting for her all along: without haste, without false timidity, without that coquettish slowing of pace used by those desperately seeking the attention of others. Not the way lonely women usually enter port bars. She simply appeared. She became part of the bar’s geometry, the way an exact brushstroke of a master becomes part of a canvas—naturally, inevitably, as if before her arrival the emptiness here had shivered in the cold, and now the world had found its completion.

Twenty-three years old—he would learn this later. But in that second, earthly age did not matter, because she belonged to a rare breed of women who exist outside chronology, the way great rivers or mountains exist outside of time: they simply always were and always will be.

Her skin was incredibly dark—deep, velvety, with that rare subcutaneous glow found in people whose flesh is nourished by the sun, not burned by it. In the tavern’s half-light, this skin cast a matte bronze and amber sheen, as if a lit match were held close to it. Short, coarse hair, buzzed almost to the scalp, ruthlessly exposed the perfect line of her forehead, her tall neck, and the fragile nape. And in this absolute openness, in this nakedness of the skull, there was no defenselessness—on the contrary, one could sense a terrifying precision, the precision of an exposed nerve or a fresh wound.

She wore a bright dress made of heavy wax-print fabric, covered in complex geometric patterns, spirals, and broken lines. Leo couldn’t decipher them, but it seemed to him that these patterns lived a life of their own, setting into motion with her every step. Every line was not a decoration, but a secret sign belonging to an ancient, forgotten language to which the human alphabet did not apply.

She slid onto a tall stool at the bar, just two steps away from them. She placed a bottle of “Aqua” mineral water with a faded blue label in front of her. The bartender, who a second ago had been lazily inspecting his nails, immediately materialized before her with ice, as if obeying the silent command of a queen.

Rémi, of course, noticed her first. That was his curse: he saw a beautiful woman the way a hunter sees a target—instantly, and with a cold calculation hiding behind practiced Parisian charm. He smoothly swiveled in his chair, leaned forward, and unleashed a dazzling smile:

“Good evening, mademoiselle. Allow me to introduce myself—Rémi Gaillard, infectious disease specialist with the World Health Organization. And this is my colleague, Leo Gonzalez. He is also a doctor, but he’s too modest for tonight and therefore prefers to keep quiet.”

She looked at the Frenchman. Calmly, directly—with that unbearable gaze that seeks nothing and avoids nothing, merely registering reality like a clean mirror.

“Imani,” she said in a low, slightly husky voice. “Imani Ngoy.”

Her name sounded like frozen music, like a voice captured in the delicate triangle of a harp, rather than a mere combination of letters. Spoken aloud, it hung in the stifling air a second longer than the laws of acoustics dictated, and from this extra second, massive goosebumps crawled up Leo’s forearms—it wasn’t anything like cold or fear—it was a wild, inexplicable sense of recognition, as if his body had recalled a rhythm it had never heard before.

“Are you a local?” Rémi asked, closing the distance.

“Depends on exactly what you mean by that word,” Imani smiled slightly, and her smile was as smooth as a mirror of water right before a stone crashes into it.

“No,” she continued, holding a theatrical pause. “I have business in Kinshasa.”

“Oh, and what might that be?”

“Personal, Doctor.”

Rémi laughed in an exaggerated manner—the way men laugh when they want to show that a slight rejection hasn’t bruised them at all—and turned to the counter:

“Bartender, more tequila. Three shots.”

Imani slowly raised an eyebrow, peering into the fogged glass.

“I don’t drink tequila.”

“You must try it,” Rémi pushed a shot glass toward her. “It’s disgusting. But paired with beer, it becomes tolerable. Just like our whole lives in this beautiful country.”

She looked at the shot glass, then shifted her eyes to Leo. He remained silent. He couldn’t think about this woman, because thought requires distance, perspective, and there was absolutely no distance left between them. Leo registered with surprise how his pulse quickened and how that very feeling was building up inside him—the feeling you get standing on the edge of a deep precipice: awe mixed with the inevitability of the fall.

“Alright,” Imani agreed and took the shot glass with thin, long fingers. “But first, I have a question for your silent friend.”

She fixed her eyes on Leo.

“You’re American, aren’t you?”

Leo flinched inwardly at the ruthless accuracy of her guess.

“What makes you say that?”

“Your French,” she tilted her head slightly, and this gesture seemed so ancient to Leo, as if she had been practicing it for centuries. “It sounds atrocious. It absolutely reeks of Texas.”

Rémi laughed out loud, slapping his knee:

“Gonzalez, she had you figured out from the first word!”

Leo smiled awkwardly. The smile came out forced.

“My parents are from Argentina,” he squeezed out. “But I went to med school at Harvard, and then practiced a bit in Texas. So yes, my French is terrible. I know.”

“It’s not terrible,” Imani held the shot glass up to the flickering neon sign, and the murky liquid flared with gold. “It’s honest. You don’t know how to hide your accent, Leo, which means you don’t know how to hide yourself. In our parts, that’s a dangerous rarity.”

She drank. In one precise, seamless motion—not downing it in a single gulp like the Russians do, but not sipping it either—as if pouring the alcohol into herself. She placed the empty shot glass on the wooden counter and closed her eyes for a moment. In that single second, her face changed strangely: the tiny mimic muscles relaxed, her full lips parted, and Leo saw through his intoxication—the way one sees internal organs on an X-ray—that beneath this mask of confidence and regal calm hid something else. Something immensely profound. Dark. Something that knew far more about him than he could ever imagine.

“And you?” Imani asked, opening her eyes and staring straight into his pupils. “How do you know this music?”

Leo didn’t immediately grasp what she meant. Then he listened: “Love is Blindness” was still dragging from the speakers like a skipping record, filling the bar with a suffocating fog of grief.

“From my childhood,” he answered quietly. “From some movie…”

“From a movie,” she repeated, and in her mouth, the word sounded like a final verdict.

They continued to drink. Tequila was followed by beer, beer by tequila. Rémi talked incessantly, telling wild stories about Bukavu and Kisangani, about how he had extinguished an Ebola outbreak and how one night, in a hospital tent, he heard someone inhuman singing behind the wall—singing so terribly and sweetly that he, an inveterate cynic, burst into tears that he couldn’t stop until dawn. And in the morning, it turned out that not a single hopeless patient had died in the camp that night, even though the hemoglobin of three of them had dropped to a critical minimum.

“Pure superstition,” Rémi got heated, and his voice was too loud, as if he were trying to convince himself, not them. “Mass psychosis driven by stress, insomnia, and local folklore. But the coincidence, you must agree, is damn strange.”

Imani listened to him in silence. She had already given up the mineral water and was drinking the burning tequila on par with them. Her silence was dense, tangible, like a pause in an orchestral score, like a total absence of sound, like the space where that sound ripens before the strike.

“And what about you, Imani?” Rémi leaned in almost flush against her, allowing himself that brazen proximity demonstrated by drunk men. “What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a teacher,” she answered calmly. “At a Catholic parish in a small provincial town. I teach little children to read, write, and count.”

“A Catholic parish?” The Frenchman smirked cynically. “And you believe in all that nonsense about the crucifixion?”

“I believe,” her eyes flashed in the dark. “Do you, Doctor?”

“I am French,” Rémi declared proudly, and it sounded simultaneously like a diagnosis, a sentence, and a ridiculous apology to the universe.

Imani smiled her smooth, watery smile, and in that smile, Leo, through his tequila-warped vision, saw a deep, almost maternal compassion. It was the way one looks at a mortally wounded soldier who hasn’t yet realized his guts have spilled onto the grass.

“Leo, and you?” She addressed him by name for the first time, and his name in her mouth took on a completely different sound—not the brief “Leo” he was used to in Boston, but drawn out, with a heavy accent on the second syllable, turning the name into an ancient description of a predator: a lion. “Why did you come here?”

“An official WHO mission,” he managed to articulate with difficulty, trying to keep his tongue from twisting. “A mobile clinic, refugee camps in Haut-Katanga.”

“Haut-Katanga…” she repeated, and a chill cut through her voice. “Well then. Perhaps we will see each other there, beyond the hills.”

“You’re going there?”

“I visit sometimes,” Imani said quietly. “You know, Leo, Katanga is the kind of place you can never leave for good. Earth that never lets anyone go alive.”

She said it casually, but through the haze, he caught something leaden, primal in her intonation. For a moment, he felt truly afraid, but it was the terrifying ecstasy of a suicide who is already standing on the parapet and knows he will step off—not because he wants to die so badly—simply because the gravity of the abyss is stronger than his will.

…Won’t you wrap the night around me…

The music continued to suffocate the bar. The tequila in the bottle ran dry. Rémi was fiercely proving something to the bartender: bringing up King Leopold, the rubber plantations, the severed hands of the Congolese, the Belgian colonial disgrace. Frenchmen always start talking incessantly when alcohol strips bare their inner loneliness. But Leo no longer heard Rémi. He listened only to her: not words—but the dense silence between them, the rhythm of her deep breathing, the silky rustle of the dress fabric against her smooth skin, the barely audible creak of the tall stool when she slightly turned her torso.

“So where are you from, Imani?” he finally asked.

“Dance with me,” she said instead of answering.

Not “let’s dance,” not “would you like to dance?” It was like an imperative mood. Like an ancient incantation. And Leo rose from the stool like an obedient mannequin, yielding to the impulse: his muscles fired before his mind had time to erect logical barriers.

He vaguely remembered the dance itself. More accurately, his memory preserved only blinding, alcohol-overexposed shards of that night, unconnected by any laws of reason.

One of those shards, burning his fingers: her hand on his shoulder. Her fingers—long, strong, with closely trimmed nails—lay on the rough fabric of his shirt, and from this simple touch, the fabric instantly dissolved, vanished, and her palm slowly rested on his bare collarbones, and the skin beneath her fingers flared with pure thermal fire.

Another shard of the night, smelling of dark-red leaves and an approaching thunderstorm: her face just inches from his. Now he knew exactly where that intoxicating floral scent came from—it emanated from her skin, from her breath, from the exposed nape of her neck. It wasn’t perfume bought in a store; it was her own scent, built into her body, inseparable from her flesh, the way a wild plant smells after a midday downpour.

Another flash of memory: her muffled voice, whispering words in an incomprehensible language that sounded nothing like French, Lingala, or Swahili. The language was guttural, visceral, and these alien words wove into a strange song. There was no familiar melody in this song—only a wild, untamed rhythm that coincided with terrifying precision with the beating of his own heart, accelerating it in defiance of the laws of medicine.

And then—she laughed. Quietly, with a rasp, revealing even, white teeth. And this laugh was strange—more liberated than joyful—the way a prisoner laughs when the iron shackles are finally cast off after years of confinement in pitch darkness.

Tequila again. Clear liquid pouring into glasses, warm beer they drank straight from the bottle. Imani threw her head back, and Leo stared, mesmerized, at the flawless line of her neck—long, defenseless, with a deep, pulsating hollow between her collarbones. He could clearly see the living, hot dark blood beating beneath her thin skin.

A brief reflection of streetlights: Rémi. The Frenchman remained seated at the bar entirely alone, watching them through the glass of his empty shot glass. For a fraction of a second, his face looked so abandoned and old to Leo that his heart painfully clenched. But Imani made a sharp movement, turned, pressed her whole body against his, and the entire world narrowed again to the size of her pupils.

And then—a taxi. A yellow, rattling “Mercedes” falling apart at the seams, with a silent driver who didn’t even look back. The night city rushed past the cloudy window: toxic neon signs, long ugly shadows on concrete walls, street vendors selling alcohol and dope, the crackle of motorcycles, fires burning on dirty shoulders, the suffocating stench of rotting garbage and fried plantains. All this flickered before his eyes like torn frames in a broken projector when the film begins to melt from the heat of the bulb.

She sat in the backseat next to him. Her palm lay on his knee. The fingers—strong, warm—gripped his joint with that ruthless precision that said: I know where you are right now, I know who you really are, I know every secret thought of yours, and you don’t need to explain anything to me.

“You reek of fear, white doctor,” she said quietly, whispering into his lips. Her breath burned.

“I’m not afraid,” he lied, feeling his mouth go dry.

“It’s not an accusation, Leo. Fear is the only honest truth of the human body. The body is always much more honest than your proud mind.”

He wanted to object, wanted to say that he had graduated from Harvard, that he was a field medic, that he had seen death dozens of times and knew how to keep a grip on himself, but the words got hopelessly stuck in his throat. Instead of answering, he leaned in and kissed her. Her lips were hot, wet, with the bitter taste of corn vodka, salt, and something primordial, earthy. From this kiss, Leo’s head spun—physically, genuinely, the way a person’s head spins when falling from the roof of a skyscraper without a parachute.

The last manifested shard of the night: the dark hotel corridor. A steep spiral staircase. A room—his own or someone else’s, he could no longer comprehend. The grinding of a key in a rusty lock. Slime-like darkness inside the room, and only a narrow strip of yellow light from a streetlamp, breaking through a crack in the shutters, falling onto the gray wall. On that wall, they saw their shadow—a single, fused, enormous, inseparable shadow of a monster with two hearts.

The bed. Coarse sheets. Their shared scent filling the room like a suffocating gas. This scent delineated a new territory, an invisible border, the crossing of which was absolutely irreversible for Leo.

And her whisper. Alien, vibrating words penetrated his ear canal. From this vibration, his eardrum fluctuated, transmitting the tremor further, into the spine, into the bones, into the blood. And then came silence. Deep, ringing, like the silence on a battlefield after the explosion of a large-caliber shell, in which two ragged breaths intertwined.

A blackout. Absolute darkness.

…Oh my heart…

A loud, insistent knock on the door tore the veil of oblivion. Leo’s eyes snapped open. The fan overhead continued to spin with its previous monotony. The white blades ticked away the seconds of his new, shattered reality. He lay on the sheets entirely alone. His whole skin was sticky, covered in a dried layer of foreign and his own sweat. The empty bottle of Lotoko rolled on the floor, and through the cracks of the wooden shutters pierced the toxic, dusty morning light of Kinshasa.

The knock repeated, louder this time.

“Mr. Gonzalez?”

The voice behind the door was female, low, and polite—the professional voice of a hotel maid accustomed to waking guests after wild nights. There was nothing personal in this voice, no mystery—pure function.

“Mr. Gonzalez, I brought your morning coffee and grapefruit juice.”

Leo sat up with a jerk. The wooden frame creaked in protest. His head was unliftable, leaden, as if after bad anesthesia. Every movement echoed with a dull ache in the back of his head; his temples throbbed wildly.

“Leave the tray by the door,” he shouted, and his own voice sounded hoarse, strained, alien to him. “I’ll get up in a second.”

The light, quick footsteps of the maid could be heard retreating down the long corridor.

“Did I order this?” he shouted after her, but the only answer was the hollow silence of the hotel.

Leo sat on the edge of the mattress for several minutes, burying his head in his hands and trying to hold on to the slipping scraps of his night visions. Then he stood up—sharply, clenching his teeth. The professional reflexes and cold analytical mind, beaten into him by years of training, instantly kicked in, drowning out the hangover delirium. A classic scenario for a foolish white tourist: a beautiful local girl in a port tavern, tequila, a memory blackout, scopolamine in the glass, empty pockets. What kind of moron do you have to be to set yourself up like this on your very first night in Africa!

He rushed to the chair where his clothes lay in a shapeless heap. Jeans. Shirt. He frantically snatched his leather wallet and opened it. A wad of cash dollars—in place, down to the last bill. The corporate Visa credit card—in place. WHO staff ID, international driver’s permit—everything lay in its strictly designated pockets, untouched, unmoved.

He shifted his gaze to the backpack standing by the wall. The zipper of the main compartment was closed, the tamper-evident seal on the lock intact. He tore it off, opened the backpack: the work laptop with complex double encryption was in its place. Passport, mission travel documents in a sealed envelope—everything was in perfect order. The medical case with ampoules was locked with its combination lock.

Not a single item in the room had moved a millimeter.

Everything was in its place.

She had taken nothing.

This thought hit him first, like an automatic blow to the gut. Right behind it came a second one, just as sticky as his sweat, and shameful: why had he even checked? He checked because protocols dictated it, because in all those frontline and troubled cities where his duty had already taken him—Nairobi, Amman, Dhaka—the same gruesome stories always circulated about expats waking up in cheap rooms with no money, no documents, or with a crude suture on their side instead of a kidney. Leo didn’t check his things because he didn’t trust Imani—he didn’t know her—simply because he had already stopped trusting this world.

Or did he actually trust her?

He picked up the phone from the table, unlocked the screen, and went into his contact list. Swiped his finger through yesterday’s history. Bar. Taxi. Hotel corridor. He remembered clearly, to the point of aching joints, how right here in the room, holding her by her slender waist, he had opened the phone, and she dictated her number, and he had pressed his fingers against the digits. She had even smiled her strange smile then and whispered, “Make sure you don’t lose it, white doctor.”

There was nothing in the phone. Not a single new entry. No name starting with an “I”. No missed or dialed number. The call log was as immaculately clean as if yesterday evening, the “Le Copacabana” bar, the tequila, and Imani Ngoy herself were merely a figment of his inflamed hangover imagination.

Leo slowly placed the phone back on the nightstand. He stood for a second, listening to the vile grating of the ceiling fan, then threw on a robe, opened the room door a crack, and retrieved the tray from the floor. On it sat a white ceramic cup of steaming black coffee, a tall glass of cloudy pinkish grapefruit juice, and two sugar cubes in paper wrappers. Bitterness upon bitterness. A standard breakfast for a standard guest.

He carried the tray to the table and headed into the bathroom to take an ice-cold shower and wash off this obsessive, maddening residue of the past night. He turned on the light. The archaic fluorescent lamp beneath the ceiling buzzed strainingly, blinked a few times, and finally flooded the yellowed tile walls with a deathly white glare.

Leo walked up to the sink and raised his eyes to the mirror.

On the large glass, slightly fogged from the morning dampness, burned a sweeping message. The letters were drawn large, with a furious, confident pressure. Thick, bright burgundy lipstick. The hand that had written this in the semi-darkness clearly did not tremble from fear and knew exactly that these words would be read.

I will find you.

Chapter Two. Stained Glass →
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