“Don’t you worry. We’re going to find the way, between the three of us. And you’re going to get the final sign. Be patient. The saint is going to help you with patience.”

“Gaspar will grow and change. You’ll have to keep covering him to keep them from getting close.”

Tali kissed his forehead to silence him, to instill trust. Juan thought about telling her that in another life she would have been his, but he kept his mouth shut. There was no other life. He didn’t want to lie.

II

The Left Hand: Dr. Bradford Enters the Darkness

Misiones, Argentina, January 1983

I want to drain your entrails with kisses

Exist inside you with all my senses

For I am a pitch-black toad with two wings.

BALDOMERO FERNÁNDEZ MORENO, “Sonnet of Your Entrails”

While he waits on his knees because he knows it will happen tonight, Bradford thinks how it’s like all those stupid stories about the minutes before death that his patients, the more and the less ignorant ones—for they all become brutish faced with death—had told him: my life is passing before my eyes, I see my whole life before me. Though it’s not exactly my life, thinks Bradford, it’s my life with him, because everything that happened before him, though not without meaning, no longer matters. He knows it will be tonight, he feels it in the place where his missing fingers once were. The absent fingers that the Darkness consumed long ago, they’re calling to the present fingers, and tonight the Darkness shines—how to explain it to someone who never saw this shining darkness emanating from that boy who is now a man and who is spreading out his arms, pale and enormous, his head bowed?—if only he’ll raise his head before the final moment, Bradford wants to see his yellow eyes before entering the Darkness, and now the scars on his belly are burning, the scars the boy gave him, he believed, when he’d touched him with those claws, nails, talons, it’s never easy to remember afterward, sharp, black fingers, there is nothing like them in the world, human or animal—maybe some mechanical instrument, a prosthesis, a disguise—the hands, in sum, had ripped at his belly and he expected to see gray entrails scattered over the grass in the hot night, but no, the wounds throbbed but didn’t burst and didn’t open and they never opened and when the boy who was a man cauterized them he did it with pure cold, and now even though he’s naked Bradford can’t see his scars but he feels them, cold and burning, ice that burns, everything is calling him toward the Darkness, it will be tonight, please show me your eyes, Juan, one last time.