The Dual Bird

When my cousin Leonardo disappeared in the summer of 1996, he left behind a collection of ceramic fragments and a black notebook full of half-translated glyphs. He said he had been corresponding with an archivist from Baracoa who claimed the glyphs were remnants of an extinct language spoken in dreams and he claimed the dreams were dangerous. The archivist warned him not to read them aloud. He read them aloud anyway.
The notebook arrived in a padded envelope marked only with a blurred red seal that looked like a bird or a bent clock. It contained one final entry before the pages turned to smudges: “The mirror-wings are real. I saw one land on the mural behind Café Colonial. It sang with my voice but in reverse.”
That was the last anyone heard from him.

***

Leonardo had been obsessed with a ceramic bowl painted with the likeness of a creature he called El Ave Dual. The Dual Bird. It looked like a heron drawn by someone in a trance—spiky legs, a triangular eye, and what seemed to be a second being dangling from its beak. “It eats symbols,” he told me once on the phone from Havana, drunk, his voice covered by static. “Or maybe it gives birth to them. Depends which side of the bowl you’re looking from.”
The bowl, he said, had been recovered near the Zapata Swamp, beneath a building that no longer existed. He had seen it once in a museum, but later he claimed the real one had vanished and been replaced by a copy. “The copy doesn’t sing,” he muttered. “The glaze is wrong. They silenced it.”
I thought he was having one of his episodes, like when he believed the murals around Havana were trying to communicate directly with him. He was especially fixated on one mural: a half-erased wall painting that read “CARE” in ghostly letters. “Look how the A is breaking apart,” he whispered. “Like it’s trying to leave the word.”
I visited the wall myself after he vanished. It was just brick and red paint, peeling in the heat, but I have to admit something stirred in me when I stood before it—a kind of pressure in the air, like being underwater. I thought I heard a voice. Not speech, exactly. Just a breath with a hint of meaning.

***

Later, I received an audio cassette in the mail. No note. Just a loop of someone whispering in a language I couldn’t place. I sent it to a linguist friend in Mexico City who said it was some mangled form of Taíno, or maybe a synthetic dialect. He didn’t like it. He said he’d been having nightmares after listening to it too long.
“I dreamed a bird flew backwards into my room,” he said. “Its shadow passed through my chest, and I woke up unable to move.”
I played it once more, late at night. The whispering didn’t scare me. But there was a part—about 37 minutes in—where the voice stopped, and I heard what sounded like the clatter of talons on tile.

***

Leonardo had once written a poem about a machine that hovered over cities like a chandelier made of prison bars. He called it La Araña del Tiempo, the Time Spider. I thought it was just surrealist junk, maybe inspired by some fevered psychedelic trip. Then I saw it.
It was August in Manhattan. I was visiting an old friend near the East River when the sky split into two tones of yellow. I looked up and saw a structure—not a machine exactly, but something assembled from pieces of cranes, cameras, and rusting cathedral spires. It hung over the skyline like an unanswered question. And underneath it, the Chrysler Building shimmered as if caught in a different dimension. The air buzzed, and, for a second, the sun turned black. Then it was gone. No one else saw it.
I asked my friend if anything strange had happened. He shook his head.

***

By then I had started collecting fragments of Leonardo’s research. People he had sent letters to. Places he had marked on old maps. One recurring site was Cuba, of course, but not the Cuba of airports and guidebooks and tourists. His maps named places like Valle del Eco Ciego—Valley of the Blind Echo—and Isla Gemela, which I couldn't find on any satellite image. In the margins of one notebook he wrote: “Cuba is the twin of an island that doesn’t exist. A double that cast a shadow before it was born.” Another note read: “The island exists slightly to the past of the present. You can reach it, but only if you forget what you’re looking for.”
I spent months trying to decipher this. Eventually, I came to believe he wasn’t talking about a geographic Cuba anymore—but a metaphysical one. A symbolic Cuba, adrift in the twilight between memory and forgetting, vibrating in the deep ocean of eternal signifiers.

***

A woman named Maritza contacted me through encrypted email. She said she knew Leonardo. They had attended a symposium in Cienfuegos on the esoteric traditions of pre-Columbian rites. “He spoke of the Bird That Carries the Double,” she said. “He believed it could unhook the soul from the false body and carry it to the Mirror City.”
I asked what the Mirror City was. She replied with coordinates off the coast of Santiago de Cuba and a grainy photo of the same wall mural Leonardo had described—the word CARE flaking off a red-brick ruin. Except in this version, there was something else: a shadow of a beak traced faintly beside the letter C. She warned me not to go.

***

It was hot and wet when I arrived and the mosquitoes were unrelenting. I hired a driver named Tomas who didn’t speak unless I asked him direct questions. I showed him the mural photo. He knew the wall. “Old American factory,” he said. “Painted over many times. Now just ghosts.”
We drove for hours. The city peeled away. Sugar fields, swamps; finally, a narrow road overgrown with vines. The air shimmered with heat and insect drone. I saw the wall before we reached it. The red had faded to rust. But the letters were still there. And the shadow-beak was real. I stepped out of the car.
There was no birdsong. No wind. The silence was full of thoughts that weren’t mine. And then I saw it.
Just beyond the wall, in the tall grass, the ceramic bowl. Cracked. Glazed with mud. The bird was still visible, drawn in black, its eye a perfect spiral. It held something in its beak—a smaller bird, or maybe a doll. I don’t know what possessed me, but I touched it.

***

I awoke in a different city. Or maybe the same one, but reflected. Everything was doubled. Every building had a twin, slightly off-kilter. People walked backwards, laughing in voices pitched too low. The sky was the wrong color—like boiled gold. I passed the mural again. This time the letters were reversed: ERAC.
In a store window, I saw myself. But older. Hollow-eyed. Smiling in a way I never had. I ran.
Eventually, I found the bowl again. It was sitting on a table in a room with no distinct doors. I picked it up and felt a presence split from me. A second self, pale and translucent, slipped from my skin and whispered, “Now you see what he saw.” I turned.
Leonardo stood in the doorway. He didn’t speak. But his shadow moved like it was breathing.

***

I don’t remember leaving the city. Or the island. Or how I got back. I just woke up in my apartment in Miami with the bowl on my kitchen table and sand in my shoes.
The bowl has changed. Now, when I look at it, I see myself inside. Not the reflection—something deeper. A version of me holding a version of Leonardo. We are both birds. We are both dolls. We are both language about to be forgotten.
Sometimes, late at night, I hear the cassette play on its own. The voice is no longer whispering but singing. And the song is a melancholic warning in reverse.

The Tower of Marsh Creek

 In the last summer before the heat became permanent, before the hills dried to bone and the birds forgot their songs, I returned to the intersection at the edge of Marsh Creek. The sun was setting, stuck like a rusty blade in the west. The traffic lights blinked their futile orders into the emptiness. Red. Green. Yellow. No one obeyed. The wind shifted but the air remained heavy, as if it remembered something terrible.

I had been driving for hours through the golden hills of Northern California, following an old journal that had once belonged to my grandfather, who said he was following the writings of someone else, a man named Marcos who wrote about a house with a tower, a doctor who married a ghost, and Miwok bones buried under the floorboards. The directions were scrawled in pencil. When I reached the light at Deer Valley Road, I stopped, not because it was red, but because something inside me recoiled, like a horse smelling blood.

To my right, beyond the bleached grass and the oaks hunched like conspirators, was the house. The house.

It stood behind a barricade of false history and state plaques, half-hidden by shadows and bureaucracy. Marsh’s house, they called it, as if it still belonged to him. A Gothic mansion with a collapsed tower and a history as translucent as a ghost’s skin. John Marsh, the first white settler in the county. Physician. Opportunist. A man who spoke Latin to Miwok children and dosed them with herbs he barely understood. He’d been murdered by his own men. Some say it was rustlers. Others say it was the land itself.

I parked near the edge of the road and got out. The wind kicked dust into my eyes. I wiped them clear and the sun dipped further, like a curse completing its arc. No one else was there. The road behind me had gone silent.

***

As I crossed the dry grass toward the ruin, I thought of what Vollmann wrote: “all history is a failed attempt at love.” Each empire is a desperate caress yearning for completion. Each war is a misunderstanding between hungry ghosts, fought by machines and drenched in innocent blood. I thought of Marsh’s tower and why he had built it so high: not just to watch for rustlers, but to see who was coming to get him, what divine vengeance was running towards him from the past.

The closer I got, the more the ground seemed to shift underfoot, as if something were moving beneath the soil. This was not just a site. It was a vessel. The trees whispered in a tongue I could almost understand.

The foundation of the house was cracked and lopsided, stones the color of dead teeth; a plaque informed me that renovations were underway, though I saw no workers, only scaffolding wrapped like a noose around the broken tower stump. A second sign claimed the Miwok had helped build the first adobe house here, that Marsh had treated them kindly. Free medicine, it said. I laughed. A dry, involuntary sound.

Inside, the house was empty. The rooms smelled of wood, dirt, and an older sense of decay. The walls were covered with old wallpaper, some floral, some geometric, all rotting. Dust hung in the air like ash from an invisible fire. I thought I heard something upstairs, the sound of a feet dragging. I went up.

***

There were three floors, though the third had partially collapsed. The second was worse: half-burned rafters, a mattress with black mold blooming across it like ink stains. A bookshelf, empty except for a single volume whose title had been worn away. I opened it and found a pressed leaf. Underneath it was a note: “Do not look at the tower at night.”

Of course, I looked.

Through the hole where the tower used to be, through that vertical scar, I could see the hills behind the house, rolling golden like the bones of old gods. There were figures out there. At first, I thought they were deer, but they moved wrong. Upright. Stiff. The kind of motion that implies rehearsal. Or ritual. I closed the book and went back downstairs, but the house seemed rearranged. I could not find the front door. I wandered, and time began to unfurl itself like a snake.

***

Night fell. It didn’t just descend, it bled from above. The sky turned purple, then black, and the stars looked down at me with the indifference of ancient survivors. I found myself in the kitchen. The sink was full of something viscous and red. Wine, I thought. Then I saw the tooth. I stepped back.

There was a mirror by the back door. In it I saw my reflection, though something was wrong. My face was smudged, like it had been painted in oil then smeared by a careless finger. My eyes were holes. Behind me, I saw the reflection of someone else. I turned around quickly but I saw no one.

The mirror was cracked down the center. A hairline fracture that spread with a sound like ice breaking.

***

Later, I woke up on the porch. I don’t remember lying down. The hills were glowing faintly in the starlight, and the oaks stood motionless. A voice came to me from the distance, not loud but persistent. A woman’s voice, speaking in Spanish or a language that had faded into Spanish centuries ago. I followed it.

The voice led me down a dry creek bed where the frogs had all turned to stone, where the dancing leaves were whispers. At the bottom, I found what I thought was a well. It wasn’t. It was the old adobe foundation, older than Marsh’s house. Stones laid by Miwok hands. The voice stopped. I looked down into the pit and saw a figure sitting cross-legged in the dark. It looked up. It had my face.

***

I don’t remember driving back, but I must have. I woke up at the intersection. The traffic light was green.

A white car passed, headlights blinking like insect eyes. The buildings on the corner, a bank, a restaurant, glowed faintly from inside, though they must have been empty at this hour. I saw my own reflection in the window. This time, the reflection smiled at me. I did not smile back.

***

Weeks went by. I told no one what had happened. What would I say? That I had met myself in the ruins of a house built by a man who feared the land he claimed to own? That the hills had whispered secrets into my mouth and now I couldn’t sleep without tasting iron?

I began to write things down. I drew symbols I had never seen. One night, I woke up standing in the yard of my house, barefoot, with a cold wind speaking through my teeth. I had painted something on my chest. Rancho Los Méganos. The Sand Dunes.

***

I read about Marsh’s tower. How it fell in the 1868 quake. How he rebuilt it in wood and it fell again in 1906. A structure fated to collapse. He built it too tall, they said. Too proud. But maybe he built it for someone else. Maybe he was waiting.

I returned to the house. The renovations had ceased. No one was there. I climbed through a window. The air was thick and soft. I found the old tower shaft and descended. There were stairs, though they should not have been there.

At the bottom I found a room. In it, I saw a stone table, a ring of dirt, and a single candle, unlit. I heard chanting. I saw shadows. I do not remember the rest.

***

They say Marsh was murdered by the men he trusted, that they dragged his body to the creek and left it for the animals to feed on. They say that the Miwok grieved him, that others rejoiced, that his wife died before she ever saw the house finished.

They say the tower was cursed, that the hill rejects permanence, that the land was never his to begin with.

They say a man lives in the house now, quiet, thin, always watching. No one sees him come or go. They say he speaks in riddles, in half remembered dreams. They say that if you knock, he will answer with your own voice. They say the hills remember everything. And they do.

 

Momentary Sacrifice

 

For several days now I had been conducting a quiet, obscure war. A small war, private, untelevised… not unlike the wars of the mendicants or flagellants; those hungry saints who beat themselves with cords to feel closer to the unnameable.

My battlefield was a chamber of weeds, a sanctuary grown wild with disuse and perhaps mercy. It may once have been a storage shed or the bones of a forgotten greenhouse. But I had made it sacred by the act of tearing.

Each morning: one bill. Always a ten. Jackson's face torn in quadrants, one piece dropped east, one west, one to the wind, one underfoot. The rite was methodical. The sacrilege was exact.

I did it to destroy the root, to disrupt the wormhole in my chest that had twined itself around the desire for accumulation. A fetish, not of worship but of yearning, of obsession, of the silent panic that can wakes me in the night, panting for what I do not yet have.

On the second day, as I stood on the weeds, I looked down at the scrap in my hand, this worn, fibrous rectangle of power, and saw it finally as it was: a piece of paper. An object without essence. A body whose soul I had invented.

I saw then how much of my life I had given to these revenants of value. How many hours I'd sold to preserve the illusion of worth.

And then… everything became transparent: the bill, the chamber, my intentions, my body, even the leaf that fluttered past my shoulder as I stooped to place the second quadrant into the soil.

I began to cry, but not for the money. Not for myself either. It was the kind of weeping that comes when a person understands, for one suspended moment, that everything around them is dying, and they too are dying, and there is no villain in it, only motion.

I thought of the people I loved. How little I had said. How foolishly I had traded time for control and business, affections for assurances, letters for ledgers.

At the third mark, I halted. I made a circle with my finger in the dust. A magic circle but not for summoning. Rather for banishing. To tell the spirit of money, or the echo of my longing for it: Go.

There were no candles, no altar, no knife. Only the final shard of the ten-dollar bill, held like a relic between two trembling fingers, and my voice, raw, trembling, untheatrical:
“I release you.
You are nothing.
You are what I made you
because I forgot the deeper thing.”

And in that moment, not redemption, not transformation, but clarity.
Clarity in the form of weeds.
Clarity in rusted nails.
Clarity in wind and tears and paper,
scattered like autumn prayers across a forgotten chamber where I, a fool of the world, had come to offer what I no longer needed.