The Book of M

by Peng Shepherd

  “Impossible,” the amnesiac said, looking up from the article.

  “Isn’t it?” Hemu asked. “Gajarajan never left the temple after he was captured as a calf. He never met the biologist—non-Hindus aren’t allowed on the temple grounds. No one showed him the—the—” He had forgotten the word for sister, as he had also forgotten his own brothers. “—the other elephant’s art.”

  The amnesiac gave Hemu back the book. He didn’t know what to say. Something was sparking in the back of his mind, like a tiny shock. Electrical impulses on synapses, Dr. Zadeh always said. It felt like more than that though. The Rigveda stories an entire country knew, the legend of Surya and his wife and her shadow, Gajarajan, his herd, their paintings. The shock trailed off somewhere deep when he tried to follow. Everything Hemu said—about the gods, about this elephant’s urban legend—always drifted off, fragmented, incomplete. But the chatter wasn’t aimless, any which way. He was talking in circles, around and around a thing he knew was important but couldn’t reach.

  “It’s probably impossible to have amnesia, as an elephant. The other elephants would remember for you,” Hemu said to himself. He touched the picture of Gajarajan. “Too bad we’re human.”

  The amnesiac watched Hemu’s face. Perhaps on the doctor’s screens, their brains looked identical, blobs of color firing randomly on black backgrounds, but inside the room they were not the same at all. He had to deal only with having forgotten—he never had to live the actual forgetting.

  “Hemu, are you afraid?” he asked softly.

  “Yes,” Hemu said.

  The amnesiac tried to smile. “Don’t be. I know it’s not much comfort, but I—I mean, I’m doing all right. You will, too.”

  Hemu shook his head, eyes wide. “You don’t get it, though.” His voice was so quiet, almost just breath. The sensors glued to their heads could see electrical pulses but not know the exact words. The amnesiac realized Hemu didn’t want the others to hear. He looked around quickly—for microphones, for cameras—as the young man leaned near. “It’s not the same thing,” Hemu whispered.

  “Why?”

  “Because you forgot everything on accident.”

  There was a moment when the amnesiac expected the door to crash open and the aides to run in, but nothing happened. It felt as though he had become lighter, or gravity had become infinitesimally weaker. He leaned in too, as close as he could. “What do you mean, on accident?” he asked. “You didn’t?”

  Hemu’s eyes searched the amnesiac’s desperately. “After your shadow is gone, there’s a pull,” he said.

  “What pull?”

  “To forget.”

  All the air had left the room. “The loss of your shadow makes you forget,” the amnesiac said slowly, reiterating what Dr. Avanthikar had said. That was what the research group and all its consultants had posited so far—there was some correlation there, even though no one knew what.

  Hemu shook his head. “No, no, I don’t think so. Not really.” He looked down at the couch, where nothing else sat on it with him. “It just makes it possible. But you don’t have to. An elephant who has had its chains cut off doesn’t have to leave its temple.”

  The amnesiac trembled as Hemu stared back at him. The look on his face was desperate. The amnesiac didn’t understand at all, but he knew that what Hemu was trying to tell him was something far more important than anything else he’d shared. It was maybe the most important thing in the world now.

  “There’s a feeling,” Hemu whispered. “A pull. I went toward it because I didn’t know what was happening at first. Every time, it felt better and better. Once I realized what I was giving up in exchange—my memories—it was too late. Now it’s just too strong. I can’t stop it.” He swallowed hard. “I don’t know if I want to.”

  “But what is forgetting yourself giving you?” the amnesiac asked.

  Hemu peeled off the sensors in one swift motion. Above, an alarm in the ceiling began to beep, drowning out their voices even further. “Magic.”

  IF YOU COULD ASK ME NOW, YOU’D WANT TO KNOW WHEN I decided. That I was going to run away. That’s fair, I suppose.

  It was the night before I did it that I became sure.

  At first I was terrified of your leaving me alone for the day. I don’t know what it’s going to be like once I start forgetting the big things, but it can’t be good. And you didn’t want to leave either. You just wanted to lie in bed with your arms wrapped around me and my hair up your nose as you spooned me. That’s what we did for the first four days after it happened—just laid there. Like if we did nothing, just stayed frozen in the moment, then time really wouldn’t pass, and I wouldn’t forget. I’d just hang suspended forever in the first few hours after I lost my shadow.

  Of course, that’s not how it works. Maybe it slowed it down some, dulled the temptation to forget for a while, but it wouldn’t have worked forever. Time always leaves you behind.

  If I’d deteriorated any faster, I think we would have just stayed there until there was nothing left of me. But by the fourth day, when we realized that I was still pretty together, you couldn’t argue anymore with me that at some point you were going to have to go look for food, to keep us alive. That’s when we decided you’d go as soon as it was light enough to see, to scavenge ruthlessly to collect a last Hail Mary stash, one that would allow us to then live out our last few . . . days? weeks? together. You could be there for me then, when it really started to happen, you said.

  After you fell asleep, into that deep, heavy unconsciousness you can put yourself into when you know you have to go scavenge the next day, I peeled back a little corner of the cardboard over the window in our bedroom—I know, I know, but I was careful not to crease it—and I watched the moon for a long time.

  You don’t know this, Ory, but since it happened, I’ve barely slept. Maybe that’s a side effect. I stay in the bed with you, limbs tangled, but while you’re snoring softly, my eyes are open. I lift my hands over my head and just stare at them. Or rather, at where they should be, but I can’t see them, because it’s too dark. The blackness is so heavy, and it’s so hard to see the outline of my fingers, that for those few hours every night, it almost feels like I still have a shadow. I never would have realized that not having one feels different from having one, but it does. And the only time I can relieve that feeling is then, when it’s really dark and I can’t see any of myself, let alone the subtle shape I should cast beneath me.

  I sat there at the window watching the moon shift silently across the sky until I heard you stir. I crawled back in beside you, jammed my nose into your neck. Even after six days without bathing, you still smelled kind of sweet, like faint vanilla that was sharpening.

  You clutched at me aimlessly, still half-unconscious, and squeezed me to you with a sleep-heavy leg that you wrapped over me. “But I have a confession about that last play,” you murmured, dreamlost, face searching for my shoulder to bury itself. You don’t know this, Ory, but you talk in your sleep when you’re upset. We sometimes have entire conversations you don’t remember at all. Your own tiny version of shadowlessness. “I have a confession to make.”

  “I know,” I whispered, trying to calm you.

  I knew where your memories were leading you. You were talking about the football game where we met.

  The sky was piercing gray that day. We were huddled together on the bleachers, shivering in our windbreakers as tiny colored dots dashed back and forth across a field far below us. You leaned closer, looking like a boy, nervous and brash at the same time. A whistle shrieked. My friends had vanished into the crowd like fog burning off a lake in late morning, Marion herding them away—and yours had pulled back just far enough to watch you make a fool of yourself. I didn’t know them then, but Paul and Imanuel were in that group, watching us. Plastic armor crashed.

  “I actually don’t know anything . . . about football.” You trailed off into a soft snore. “I’m only here because my friend Paul made me . . .”
/>   I shifted, fixing your pillow gently.

  “You ready to get out of here?” you asked, the same way you had the first time. Later you told me it was the most daring, stupid way you’d ever invited a girl to dinner—that you were convinced you had to seem nonchalant to impress me, but were terrified you’d just blown it as soon as the words were out.

  “Shh,” I hummed into your ear, but you didn’t quiet. I knew you wouldn’t until I repeated what I’d said—whenever you had this dream, you never did until I answered. “I’m always ready,” I finally said.

  You settled, smiling faintly. I stroked your hair until I thought you’d drifted back down.

  “It’s so strange,” you mumbled suddenly. Your voice was so clear that I looked at you in surprise in the darkness, but you were still asleep, eyes still closed. Your fingers dawdled clumsily at the collar of your shirt, where the single silver chain necklace you always wear disappeared beneath the cotton collar. “My ring is gone.”

  “What ring?” I asked.

  “My wedding ring,” you answered.

  Deep inside me, something horrible bloomed. A drowning, drowning dread.

  “I don’t know how I could have lost it . . .” Your eyelids fluttered. “Don’t know.”

  “Maybe you took it off and put it somewhere,” I whispered. I tried to hide the horror in my voice.

  “I never take it off.” You smiled faintly at me from the other side of sleep. “You know that.”

  “Of course I know,” I said. But I didn’t. I didn’t at all.

  “Don’t understand,” you repeated again. “The only way is if it broke, but the chain is still here.” Your next dream started to pull you deeper again. “The chain is still here.” The words became less and less clear. “Do you . . . Do you think . . .” You trailed off as your leg twitched. Then you were gone, whisked away from your worry somewhere deeper, somewhere more peaceful. “Maybe . . .”

  Once you began to snore, I lifted your left hand carefully off the covers in the darkness and gently felt my way down your palm toward your third finger. Please be there, I prayed. Please be there.

  But it wasn’t. There was no weathered silver band. Because of course you had—it made perfect sense now. Of course you had moved it from your hand to a neck chain so it wouldn’t get in the way during your scavenging or attract attention if you happened to run into anyone looking for something to steal. So you didn’t lose it.

  Only now you had, because without it there on your finger to see every day, I had forgotten you still had your wedding band, that you hadn’t misplaced it somewhere in the early days or while searching the downtown. I had forgotten you had moved it to the chain on your neck who knows how long ago, and so I had forgotten you had it at all.

  I put your hand back down on the covers as softly as I could. Your bare, ringless hand. “Fifty-two,” I whispered to your sleeping form.

  That’s when I knew I had to leave. Before it was too late.

  I understood then how the Forgetting works. Why sometimes we shadowless simply don’t remember anymore and why other times something changes: there’s a difference between when the mind forgets and the heart does. The memory means more, the more it’s worth to you—and to who you are. The heart has a harder time letting go. But what happens when you refuse to let go of a delicate thing as it’s being pulled away from you? It stretches. Then it tears.

  Do you know what means the most to me of all, Ory? Out of everything that’s left in this world? Don’t you see now why I had to leave you? That I had to do it? That I had no choice?

  Do you know what could happen when I forget you?

  Orlando Zhang

  ORY SAT THERE FOR A WHILE ON THE LAST REMAINING section of curb on the street.

  Of course it was more possible that Max wouldn’t be there than that she would. He’d just refused to think about it, because he knew if he did, the logic to give up would have been overwhelming. He could only believe that she’d headed for their home, and then follow her. What else was he supposed to do? Just let her go? Just leave her to forget, even though it was his fault, even though she’d still be in the shelter with him if he hadn’t gone to Broad Street? He was just supposed to go on living and let her die? Ory tossed the pebble in his hand and watched it skitter over the asphalt.

  Their apartment was gone. The entire block had collapsed in on itself, into a pile of steel bars and sand. Ory watched the air a few feet up from the ground, where the front door should have been. Where he was supposed to have walked through and found Max.

  “She’s not here,” he said softly to himself. Either she’d come and then gone when she saw that their home was destroyed, or she never came. Ory picked up a handful of the gray powder and let it slide through his fingers. “Where are you, Max?” He sighed. The sand hissed. “Where?”

  His shoulder ached where the sharpened pebble had cut him. The streets had begun to look more menacing in the late-afternoon light—he needed somewhere safe to camp within sight of the property. He pressed down harder to stanch the cut and grimaced.

  “I see you’ve met the four sisters,” a voice said.

  The shotgun was already aimed. “The what?” Ory asked.

  A tall, thin man emerged from the half doorway of an abandoned business farther down the street. A shadow followed him. “The four sisters,” he repeated, and gestured to the gash on Ory’s shoulder. “New around here, aren’t you?”

  Ory slowly nodded. There was no point to try to hide it. It was obvious the man knew the answer anyway.

  “Famous for their hospitality.” He smiled. His eyes lingered on Ory’s pockets. “You’re lucky you still have your stuff.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Ory said. “I approached them. I just wanted to ask if they’d seen my wife. She might’ve passed through here.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. “Lost shadowless?” he asked.

  “About a week now. She would’ve—this is the building where we used to live.”

  “What’s she look like?”

  “You think you saw her?”

  “What’s she look like?” he repeated.

  Ory scrambled for his wallet photo. “She’s about five-five, dark skin, brown afro, green eyes. Her name is Max, she has a scar over her right eyebrow—” It was too much to hope for. Did the man know the faces of most of the women hiding around here?

  “I very well might,” the man said as if he’d read Ory’s mind. “I’m a finder, you see.” When he realized Ory hadn’t heard the term before, he shrugged and stuck his hand out. “Give it here.”

  Ory passed him the photo. “Her name is Max,” he said again.

  The man took one look and then nodded. “Oh, I have seen a woman like that,” he said.

  Ory snatched the photo back and stared into Max’s face. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “When?”

  “Maybe one, two days ago.” He pondered. “She was alone.”

  “Did you talk to her? Was she all right?”

  “I don’t talk to shadowless,” he said. “Professional policy.”

  Ory felt dizzy. “Which way did she go? Can you show me?” He held the photo out again, his hand trembling. “Are you sure it was her?”

  The man looked a second time and nodded. “It was her,” he said. “Max.” The name came slowly, as if he was trying it out.

  “I’m begging you.” Ory felt himself drop to his knees before he even realized he was doing it. “Show me where she went.”

  Mahnaz Ahmadi

  BY THE TIME THEY REACHED WASHINGTON, D.C., ROJAN WAS feverish, the color of sweating white cheese. The wound in her thigh stank like rotten meat. The most horrible part about it was that Naz was so hungry sometimes it almost smelled good to her. They hadn’t eaten in weeks, and were starving; Naz’s sports bra had become so loose under her shirt it was almost more like a short tank top, and Rojan’s trousers would have fallen right off if she hadn’t been lying down on the makeshift pa
llet Naz had cobbled together so she could drag her to the city, where they hoped to find better shelter than the woods. But they found when they made it to D.C. that there was no food there either. The shops had all been picked clean long ago. There were just dead bodies, empty buildings, and shadowless. Rojan’s wound festered further, blooming like some horrible raw steak flower across her leg.

  That was what they were doing the morning they saw their first shadowed survivors since Wright. Starving and dying.

  She and Rojan were crouched in the hovel they’d made their home, listening to the sounds. All the streets downtown were close together—and there was so much activity. Screams echoed throughout the nights. Strange rain during the day that somehow soaked only every other street, and to Naz’s terror and bafflement, followed movement, as if tracking her. Footsteps for which she could never pinpoint the origin. By this point, she’d lost count of how many she’d killed. It was far greater than six. But now Naz was always afraid that the next time they ran into someone—shadowed or shadowless—she’d be too weak to fight them off, even with the bow. That the next time it happened, it would be the end.

  When Naz first heard the footsteps, she thought that day had come.

  She dropped to the ground inside their shelter, pressing her stomach against the dusty wood floor. Rojan opened one eye weakly to look at her. As quietly as Naz could, she slid an arrow out of her quiver and nocked it. She poked her head over the half wall of their shelter to steal a glance, and almost choked. Not one or two, but an entire horde of shadowless was prowling outside.