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“You have my heart?” he says.
I open the jar. Until this moment, it hasn’t occurred to me to make sure it’s inside. I reach in and touch something wet. Pull out a big fistful of long, thin leaves. Graveyard tree, a common poison in old Eastern European Sub Rosa families. I peel back the leaves to reveal a thick mass of gray muscle. Townsend’s heart does not look in tip-top shape. While I peel off the rest of the leaves, Vincent sings quietly. “Mack the Knife” from The Threepenny Opera. Kasabian hums along.
“I don’t exactly know what’s going to happen when I do this. You ready?” I say.
He nods, still singing.
I lean over his open chest with the heart.
“Stark,” says Allegra.
“Yeah?”
“You’re putting it in backward.”
I turn the heart around.
“Thanks.”
With one hand on the edge of the tub, I push Townsend’s gray, dead heart into Vincent’s chest.
Instantly, it begins to beat. Blood vessels, arteries, and ventricles stretch to meet each other. Blood begins to flow. The heart turns red. Vincent doesn’t move.
“How do you feel?” I say.
Vincent turns to look at me. The whites of his eyes gradually fill with blood, turning a burning red.
“Fine,” he says. “Better by the second.”
His voice is different. Lower. It sort of ripples, deep and slow, like he’s speaking through heavy sluggish water.
Allegra looks at me like she’s saying, Is that normal?
I shrug.
Vincent sits up in the tub, pulls Allegra’s tools off. The skin on his chest knits itself shut.
“Thank you,” he says. “All of you.”
“You okay to travel?” I say.
He stands.
“Can we go now?”
“Give me a minute.”
I find my coat and go through the pockets.
Back with Vincent, I pop the pomegranate seed in my mouth. I nod. Vincent, still naked, starts to fade away. Candy comes over and hugs me. I put my good arm around her. Then bite down on the seed.
My vision shifts like someone jerked my head all the way around. I’m in L.A., but it’s a junked, almost nuked place. Trash and burned-out cars in the streets. Empty storefronts. The dead city just beyond Tenebrae Station. Vincent is waiting for me.
“This way,” says.
We walk through the pagoda-like Chinatown gate, go a few blocks through town and across the twisted, useless metro line tracks. In regular L.A., this would be the Los Angeles State Historic Park. Here, it’s the beginning of the desert. The real land of the dead. Tenebrae city is for the spirits that don’t want to pass over. A literal ghost town. The desert is where the other souls are divided up and sent—let’s face it—mainly to Hell.
A half mile across the dry, cracked plain, a dust devil reaches into the sky. I stop for a minute, but Vincent keeps walking. I have to trot a few steps to catch up.
