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 He had seen it once in a museum, but later he claimed the real one had vanished and been replaced by a copy.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.
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