There was a room left on the top floor of House 47, the most recently finished house—and the farthest open spot away from House 33—so she went there. Zhang said he didn’t want her to go, but she couldn’t stay. Not after she knew that the shadowless who had been successfully rehabilitated was his Max, and that she’d be ready to rejoin the world in a day. What was Naz supposed to do? Just sit at the communal kitchen table while Zhang brought her through the door and they talked upstairs? While he—moved her into his room right beside hers? It was better this way. She needed time to think.
In her braver moments, she wanted to be happy for him. To find anyone again after what had happened was nothing short of a miracle. What would she give if Rojan could come back? But this was different. Zhang had added to Naz’s life, but she had taken Max’s place in his.
House 47 was full of a group of university students from Memphis who had walked to New Orleans because some of them used to have parents who lived in Metairie. They all knew one another pretty well and let Naz keep to herself. That was good. She signed on for a few extra shifts on the wall, and decided to spend some time with Malik before he left, which he was convinced would be soon, despite the fact that nothing he’d brought to Gajarajan had been anywhere near the “indisputable proof” he needed to be able to go. She almost went to him after she put her clothes in House 47 and signed up for his crazy mission, too, but she stopped herself on the walk over. It would have been for the wrong reasons. She would have been doing it to punish Zhang, to force his hand in choosing.
In truth, she knew she probably should have done it. She should have forced it. Max was his wife. If Naz was on the road for five, six months, it would make everything a lot easier. She’d come back, and it would be over. Maybe then she’d go out again, and just keep going out every time another mission was ready. But it turned out she didn’t have the guts. Or maybe she had too much hope. Impossible hope. But she also was watching the impossible happen right in front of her.
It should have been the most romantic story in the world: wife loses her memory and disappears, husband traverses the country, braving wilderness and war to find her, against million-to-one odds. Naz was sure that Zhang prayed every night that Max wasn’t dead, that he’d really be with her once more, never actually believing any of it was possible. Otherwise, none of this between he and Naz would have happened. He was the one who leaned forward to kiss her that night in her room, not she. He thought he finally had to forget Max, because she was never coming back.
Except here she was. And she remembered.
Orlando Zhang
ORY WAS SURPRISED TO SEE THAT THE ENTRANCE TO THE sanctuary had no door.
“I guess I’d just assumed,” he said to Gajarajan. They were standing inside the first great hall, all of Ory and half of him. Gajarajan’s body remained outside, on the other side of the altar. Over the top of the wall, draped like thin black tulle and then trailing across the ground to where it sat upright against the entrance beside Ory, was his shadow. “Usually places where humans live have doors.”
Gajarajan considered. “I suppose the places where elephants live don’t,” he said, and ruffled his ears. “There are only two doors in the entire sanctuary.” For a moment, he continued to ponder the idea in silence. Then the shape of his massive head angled slightly more toward Ory, the curved tusks disappearing as they turned from semi-profile into straight on. “Are you feeling all right?” he asked gently. “Yes,” Ory lied, and tried to smile, but he just felt ill. It seemed clammy inside the great hall, nothing like the sweltering heat outside. Keep it together, he reminded himself, and forced his teeth to stop chattering. His fingers found and squeezed the square outline of his wallet through his trouser pocket for strength, where the fossil of Max’s photograph lay tucked inside. He still had it, even after so many months and miles—although it had long faded beyond anything recognizable. He’d crossed states, fought in wars, fallen into moving lakes, and now it was no more than a gray slip of paper with a vague, human-shaped smudge at the center. Almost as if it had slowly become a portrait of Max’s shadow rather than of her.
“I can imagine this is . . . an intense moment,” Gajarajan finally said. “To be able to meet your wife again.”
Ory managed to nod. “Were you married before?”
“No,” the shadow said. “Not really.”
Ory looked down. It had seemed like a strange choice of words, but then he realized it wasn’t at all. Not really had in fact meant yes. “I’m sorry,” he replied.
“Don’t be. I don’t remember.” Gajarajan shrugged softly, such a subtle and human gesture.
Ory didn’t know if he’d ever get used to seeing it. It had taken him forever to be able to look at a person with no shadow. Now there was a shadow that moved all on its own.
“I’m going to get you settled first, and make sure you’re comfortable and prepared,” Ory realized Gajarajan was saying. “Then we’ll bring Max in.”
“How is she doing?” he blurted out.
“Very well,” Gajarajan replied. “The body was in bad shape when it arrived. Dehydrated, exhausted. It was very difficult, the rejoining—you know how dangerous it can be. I didn’t know if it was going to take. But it did. Now she’s healthy, happy—and ready to meet you again. She remembers you.”
Ory did his best to nod. It seemed beyond believable—that the single shadowless Gajarajan had been able to save out of all of them so far was Max—his Max. He was still too afraid to fully believe it.
“Please, after you,” Gajarajan said, and gestured to the other end of the first hall, his dark arm sweeping across the wall. “I’m coming too, don’t worry.”
As they walked, the shadowless sitting on mats in little clusters looked up at Gajarajan, then Ory. Some seemed to have no idea who he was, or had known and forgotten, but a few must have heard the news. “Congratulations,” they said softly, with a happiness that was almost more like awe. They found each other, after all this, in the end. He could see what it meant to them, what they were watching happen. She remembers again. It worked. It’s possible after all.
At the end of the first great hall was a corridor, and then a door.
“One,” Gajarajan said, meaning the first of the only two doors.
Ory nodded as he looked at it. What would it be like to live in a place where you had to walk this far before you hit a barrier? He had imagined that when you became shadowless, there were hundreds more doors, not fewer.
Gajarajan’s shadowy arm slithered across the face of the wood. “The second door is just inside. It leads into the second great hall.”
“What’s this, then?” Ory asked as the first door started to move, the shadow’s dark, two-dimensional outline impossibly pushing the three-dimensional thing open.
“The visiting room,” Gajarajan said.
In the small space, there were four chairs around a simple wooden table. Max’s tape recorder was in the center of its bare surface.
“Oh, God,” Ory said.
“It’s the same one,” Gajarajan confirmed.
“The same one,” he repeated, entranced. He clenched his fists to stop himself from leaping at it. “Can I hold it?”
“Of course,” Gajarajan said. “It belongs to you and Max.”
For a moment, Ory didn’t move. Then he did. He sat down first, and gently touched the cool plastic. Then he realized it had no shadow beneath it. “Does it—?”
“Unfortunately, no,” Gajarajan said softly. “It doesn’t play. I had to use them—the recordings. To form her shadow into the right shape. Otherwise it would have been just a rectangle, hardly the form of a woman at all.” He paused. “At the time she arrived, I didn’t know what had happened. Who you were, if you were still out there . . . My first obligation was to Max. To restore her memories, as completely as I was able.”
“No, that . . .” Ory nodded. “That was the right thing to do.”
Gajarajan shifted on the wall, edging closer. “It might
be best to leave it on the table during the reintroduction,” he added kindly. “As an object you both share.”
Ory nodded again and pulled his hands back into his lap. “Yes, that’s a good idea,” he heard himself say. He looked up at the second door, the one on the other side of the room. It was far, far heavier. It almost seemed as if it wasn’t made of wood, but another material entirely.
“That one can be opened only from this side, the outside,” Gajarajan said when he saw Ory studying it. “A good friend remembered that a long time ago.” He draped himself across the chair next to Ory, sitting without needing to pull it out first. He had left the one directly across empty, Ory noticed. For Max. “I didn’t want it that way, but it’s for the best, for everyone’s protection. Taking and rejoining a shadow can be . . . complicated. If something goes wrong, it would be very bad if a shadow or shadowless could let themselves out.”
“How do you get in and out then?” Ory asked.
Gajarajan pointed up, at the ceiling. “There’s an opening in the roof in the room. I stretch up the outside wall and then reflect down through there.”
Ory nodded numbly. It occurred to him again just how far away from his physical body they were.
“I . . .” Gajarajan paused. His chest was on the back of the chair and his head on the wall behind it. “I just want to apologize for how long it took me to realize that you were the Ory in the recordings.” He lifted his great ears against the surface of the wall, in a gesture of helplessness. “I really had no idea. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Ory stammered. It was too late to be angry. “She’s here now.”
“She is,” Gajarajan nodded.
The shadow stood, and Ory braced himself when it vanished. Gajarajan had to check on Max one more time, to make sure she was also ready for him to open the door that was separating them. Ory waited in agonizing silence, trying to decide if it had been fifteen seconds or fifteen hours. She was just feet away from him. He couldn’t stop straining to catch any hint of sound in the silence. He tried to figure out what he would say. Would he introduce himself again, or greet her as he always had? Should he shake her hand? Hug her? Could he kiss her—if she wanted? Would he have the courage? The time passed by in a garbled blur.
Then suddenly Gajarajan was back, in one instant darkly reflected against the far wall, ears ruffled with excitement. Max was ready. Ory trembled. It was really happening. He was already crying.
He watched the elephant reach for the second door that only opened from this side. Across the front, Ory realized there were letters burned into it, in all capitals. SHADOWS INSIDE, it said. A stamp in the shape of an elephant’s face—wide ears, twin tusks, long, drooping trunk—was seared after.
“Are you ready to meet Max again?” Gajarajan asked.
“BREATHE, MAX,” GAJARAJAN SAID. THAT WAS ALSO THE FIRST thing I understood once I began to remember English again, as soon as I recognized my name. I tried to breathe, and nodded at him as he hovered beside me on the wall. He had come in through the roof to make sure I was ready first, and then would go back the other way around to open the door that could be opened only from the other side. To unite me with you again, Ory.
“I’m breathing,” I said. Gajarajan draped his trunk over my shoulder to reassure me and seemed to smile.
The sanctuary is a good place. I like it here. I’ve learned about how it is outside in the city, gardens and horses and bicycles and people, and I want to see it. But I also want to be able to come back here, to the second hall. Once you leave, you can never come back here, though. You can lose your shadow only once. That’s what Gajarajan says.
He started telling me about you as soon as I’d remembered enough words to have a true conversation. He played me the tape. My tape. The recorder was so old and beaten up that the sound came out faint and tinny, so I had to strain to hear it. Gajarajan and I would wait until it was night, after all the other shadowless in the first great hall had gone to sleep and the city was quiet again, and listen. It was so damaged it almost didn’t sound like me, but just enough. I could make out a woman speaking, a soft high voice, and understand most of her words.
“All my memories were in here?” I had asked in the beginning.
“Yes,” he nodded. “You made this before you forgot everything. When we found you, you were carrying it in one hand, holding tight. You kept your memories.”
That’s what all the other shadowless like to say, he told me. That I “kept my memories” even though I lost my shadow. You, the shelter in Arlington, leaving home, the caravan, the terrible kidnapping by Transcendence, the last lucid moments of my journey south. How badly I wanted to make it here, to see if all the rumors were true. It’s a strange thing to think about—my memories. That I still had them even though I didn’t know I had them.
I shouldn’t complain. Most shadowless come here with absolutely nothing, or lose what little they do have left soon after. And so few of us arrive bringing with us something that means more than the shade from an empty bottle, a piece of trash. To find a shadow that will match a person is much more difficult than it seems. Another thing from nature might be too strong or different, and a useless object might be too weak. And even if it does match approximately, nothing comes with it. No recollection. That was the only trouble with the books you brought, Gajarajan told me. The shape and size were just about right, but the memories are of invented characters, not real humans. They aren’t like my recorder. The shadowless would be made into new people—not old ones.
That’s why my shadow was the one that finally worked. Gajarajan has been able to separate many shadows, and even reattach some of them to the shadowless, but they never stuck, or not all the way. They didn’t fit. So far I’m the only patient whose shadow has.
And then, just yesterday, he told me that you had come to New Orleans, too. Against all odds, you didn’t disappear when I forgot you, and you found me again. Maybe it was because of this tape recorder after all. Because you were inside the whole time.
“Gajarajan really made that for you?” the young shadowless girl beside me asked. She was staring at my shadow as it lay flat across the floor behind me, the same way she had been since Gajarajan brought her here early this morning. At its long arms, its slender waist, the floating cloud of tightly wound curls springing in all directions from its head.
“He really did,” I said.
She continued to stare, transfixed. She had dusky skin, and the same soft, buoyant afro that matched the shape of my own shadow’s, when I looked at them both in front of me. “Did it hurt?”
“I don’t remember.” I smiled. I crouched down next to where she was sitting on the edge of what would become her bed now, since I would leave the sanctuary, and my shadow copied. Perfectly bound, perfectly in sync. “But I don’t think so.”
“Vienna fought together with your husband against a great danger—more than once. She’s a good friend of his,” Gajarajan said, sliding across the wall to where we were.
“I am?” she asked.
“You are,” Gajarajan said. “I hope to be able to help you remember soon.”
I smiled again as I looked at her. Vienna. I don’t know how many other shadowless you know, Ory, but here was at least one then. At least you were friends with one other like me. I hoped that would help make it less strange, if you did think it was strange. “I look forward to seeing you again, Vienna,” I said.
Vienna shook my hand. My shadow shook hands with nothing. “Me too. Remind me—if it works, if I meet you again, remind me how we met so I can know.”
I memorized her face. It was easy, burned into my brain in an instant. Gajarajan had taught me techniques to boost memory, once my new shadow took. Letter games, patterns, rhymes. He learned them himself a long time ago from a wise old man he called Dr. Zadeh. His own teacher, he’d said. Now that I can make memories again, Gajarajan thinks that I actually remember new things better than someone who never lost their shadow in the first p
lace.
“It’s time for me to take Max outside now, to meet her husband,” Gajarajan said then to Vienna. My heart began to thunder. “I’ll be back soon, and we’ll talk more about how we’ll find you a new shadow.” His ears ruffled, and I had the impression he’d winked at her. “It shouldn’t hurt,” he added, answering her previous question. “I promise. I’m getting better at this. I learned a lot from Max.”
“It’ll be over before you know it,” I added to reassure her, although it was a lie.
Most of the rejoining was just fragments to me. Moments out of place and time that played like damaged film, stuttering and without sound. But enough to know that it had not been easy for Gajarajan. Not easy at all. It had been harder to join the tape recorder’s shadow to me than any other shadow he’d ever tried on another shadowless before, including even the alligator’s. He’d had to fight it onto me, as if it hadn’t wanted to be joined to something new. Later, Gajarajan told me he’d never had something resist that hard before. But the shadows he tried before had been made of birds and mice and trees and rocks—never something that was partly made from a human. And never something that contained so many memories.
It didn’t matter. It had worked. I remembered. And I hoped it would be smooth for Vienna, but even if it went as roughly for her as it had for me, she would say the same as I would—that it was still worth it in the end. To remember who I was. I gladly would have suffered far worse to have my name back once more. To have you again.
“In the meantime, why don’t you think about anything you might still have with you that has great meaning to you?” Gajarajan said to her. “It’s all right if you don’t remember. But if you do have anything, that might be a good place to start.”
Vienna worked something out of her collar and held it up. A locket on a tarnished chain. “Maybe this?” she asked. Inside were two badly weathered faces, a woman with short hair and a gentle smile and a man with a serious face. They both looked just like her. “My mother and father.” She pointed to the photographs. “When we lost her, he gave it to me. I don’t remember her name. But I remember that this was hers.”
The Book of M Page 44
