The Book of M

by Peng Shepherd

  In Max’s case, she’d been calm enough not to scramble through all their belongings, trying to parse back together her history from the clues. She had still shut the door when she left, and had maybe taken some food and supplies with her on her way out. It was eerie.

  And she had taken the tape recorder with her. Ory had searched the entire shelter, and was sure of it. It was nowhere there.

  Mahnaz Ahmadi

  IN THE SUMMERS, NAZ’S ARCHERY PRACTICE WAS VERY EARLY, before the humidity became too unbearable. From June to August, Boston was like the inside of a clay baking tagine. It was almost worse than Tehran. She had to get up at four A.M., but would still watch the news for updates on Hemu Joshi’s condition while she dressed in darkness before pulling herself away to go to practice.

  It only got worse. By the third week, Hemu had forgotten almost everything about his life. He couldn’t recognize his mother, and when asked if he had any siblings, couldn’t name his brothers. He could recite his phone number but not his address. He knew he was born and raised in Pune, but didn’t seem to know that Pune was in India or that India was a country. Then he forgot what cricket was.

  On the archery range, Naz tried to concentrate, but her mind wasn’t there. She wondered if she should go back. India was scarily close to home. Her sister emailed and said to stay, not to give up her training, that there was nothing she could do in Iran to help anyway. Naz hid her phone in her sports bra between shots, then would lean down so her hands were hidden and text someone—her next-door neighbor, her friends back in Tehran—anyone, it didn’t matter. They were all talking about the same thing. Did you see the test where HJ could only remember 4 of the days in a week? Or HJ just tried to list all the streets in his neighborhood, did you watch that one?

  Yeah. Did you see the clip where they showed him pics of his classmates from high school and he tried to name them? they’d reply. It was constant. After a few days, Naz started to worry she was going to get kicked off the team, but then she peeked down the line of targets and realized the other archers were all doing the exact same thing. Go to CNN live stream, they have an update.

  She kept waiting for good news, but there never was any. Only bad and worse. Then the Angels of Mumbai began to follow Hemu’s path as well, just like the Nashik Cherubs. All suffering various degrees of amnesia, with no discernible pattern across age, sex, education, or geography. There was one woman from Mumbai who seemed to be decaying the slowest, while one of the teenagers from Nashik had completely forgotten all the facts of his childhood and his ability to speak Marathi, the local dialect, within five days of becoming shadowless.

  Scientists from every country took over the television channels, armed with hypotheses and ideas for experiments to explain why the shadows never came back, or why without one, a mind starts to flake away like ash on a cindered log. In India, doctors ran test after test on Hemu, trying to prove it was early-onset Alzheimer’s, trauma-induced amnesia from one too many cricket balls to the head, stress from the fame, hippocampal damage due to alcoholism he didn’t have, whatever. They took a brain scan from a patient in the United States—a middle-aged man who had suffered total and permanent retrograde amnesia in a car accident just a few weeks before Hemu Joshi’s own case appeared—to compare to that of Hemu. Patient RA, he was dubbed by the media, to protect his privacy. Oddly, there was nothing abnormal about Hemu’s images. The news reported that the two men even met, the American amnesiac and Hemu Joshi. They flew Patient RA from New Orleans all the way to Pune for a week, to see if talking to another person suffering a similar affliction might knock something loose.

  It didn’t. Patient RA flew back home with his entourage of doctors, to return to his assisted-living facility. After that, videos of Hemu never appeared on air again. Naz didn’t know what that meant.

  Reports about the other shadowless from Mumbai and Nashik still filled every broadcast, though. The experiments grew wilder as the scientists grew more desperate. They shocked them, hypnotized them, starved them of sleep and then tried to plant memories in their delirious states, cut into their brains. Nothing worked. It sounded silly, but Naz knew there was no other way to say it. The earth’s rotation aside, what happened to them wasn’t science. It was magic.

  Even so, she couldn’t stop staring at the scientists poking at them on the news, whenever they gave interviews. The world kept following. Everyone hoped they would all get better. That they’d remember who they were, that they’d recognize their families again. But they never did.

  She probably would’ve kept watching forever, rooting for them, but eventually she had to stop. There was just nothing left to watch. Stories about the shadowless disappeared from broadcasts, and even the skeleton crews pulled back, until there was no coverage at all. It seemed to be the end.

  Until eight days later, a curly-haired kid in Brazil looked down during lunch recess and realized he didn’t have a shadow anymore. And then two days after that, he couldn’t remember his own name.

  THE BRAZILIAN PRESIDENT WAS ON THE AIR ABOUT FIVE hours after the news broke, announcing that he’d closed Brazil’s borders to all international travel, to help contain whatever this was. Brazilians abroad weren’t allowed to return, and noncitizens could go only as far as their embassies. It was an international outrage, but no other country dared to actually retaliate or rescue their citizens by force—they’d have to send soldiers in for that. Into the place where shadows were disappearing.

  The kid’s family vanished. There was POLICÍA—NÃO SE CRUZAM tape up around their property on the news, and the Brazilian government released a statement that said they’d been taken into custody in order to provide them “the best treatment possible.” The phrase chilled Naz. Their neighbors put themselves into self-imposed quarantine. None of them lost their shadows. Americans camped angrily out in the consular hall of the U.S. embassy in São Paulo. Australians built a giant barbecue on the front lawn of their own. Naz emailed Rojan about going home again, but tickets had jumped to $15,000. Airports everywhere but Brazil were overrun with desperate travelers trying to run to—or run away from—somewhere. So instead, Naz just held her breath, hoping it was some kind of strange fluke.

  But it wasn’t. Another case showed up on the other side of Brazil, completely unconnected, near the border with Peru. Then a week after that, it seemed like all the shadows in Panama disappeared at the same time.

  I DIDN’T LEAVE A NOTE, BECAUSE I THOUGHT THAT MIGHT BE worse. If you just think that I forgot you and wandered away, you could eventually forgive yourself, I hope. You’d still follow our first rule, before we had the other rules. The only rule that matters now. That you won’t come after me.

  I know, Ory, I know. I know you made that rule to protect me. You never thought that someday, I’d be the one who didn’t return. But don’t you see? That’s why it had to be like this, like I’d already forgotten you, so you wouldn’t follow me. I did it to protect you, Ory. Not to hurt you. If you knew not only that I had left, but that I did it on purpose, while I still remember you . . . you wouldn’t understand. You still have your shadow—you can’t understand. No note I could leave could ever convince you not to look for me—convince you that I left because I had to. I had to. To save you.

  So I left nothing. Just disappeared.

  Everything looks so different, it’s hard to tell where I am. I thought I was prepared. I mean, I’ve seen the back of the shelter where the trap is, and some of the overgrown hills nearby—but the resort was always sort of foresty anyway, all grass and trees. I haven’t been outside the grounds probably since everyone else from the wedding was still here. So when I got to the bottom of the mountain and looked left and right, trying to figure out where I was, it looked so unlike Elk Cliffs Road that I never would have recognized it in a million years. I had to close my eyes and figure out what it had looked like before, how to get where I wanted to go, from memory. Which is kind of hilarious, considering. It’s fucking hilarious.

  Sorry, bad
joke. I guess I’m more nervous than I thought I’d be, out on my own like this.

  It’s been only a few days, but I’m actually not as hungry as I expected. You remember what the scientists said, back when it started—that once a shadowless has forgotten everything, it also forgets it’s hungry or thirsty, or even that it needs to breathe. God, I hope I forget to eat or drink before I forget to breathe. I’d rather starve a hundred times than suffocate to death. Can you imagine? All that pain, the fire in your lungs, the slow, darkening stillness, and all you’d have to do is just take a breath, if only you could remember that your body could do it?

  I’m sorry, Ory. I’m sure you don’t want to hear that. I find myself thinking about stranger and stranger things. Maybe it’s one of the effects.

  Part of me still can’t believe I did it. That I actually left you. It almost seems like someone else’s memory when I think back on it now, for as long as I still can—like I’m watching someone who looks like me, but isn’t.

  The morning of that seventh day, when you finally went to the city to search for food, you gave me one last nervous look before you shut the door behind yourself to head off. The key twisted in the lock. I waited until your footsteps had faded. If there was a window uncovered that faced the direction you were walking, I would’ve watched you hike through the ever-tangling weeds until you disappeared. Instead, I counted to five hundred.

  Then I went into the closet, took down the bag of sweaters from the top shelf, and filled the purse I brought for Paul and Imanuel’s wedding with the essentials: underwear, some of our first-aid kit, one flashlight, our spare hunting knife. My tape recorder.

  I worked quickly on purpose. So fast I couldn’t think about what I was actually doing. If I’d gone any slower, my resolve would have failed. I zipped up the inner pocket of the purse, threw it over my shoulder, marched to the door, turned the lock, stepped out, and then shut it behind me. Click.

  That’s when I paused.

  The finality of it really hit me then. That as soon as I walked away from that door, I’d never be able to find it again. I’d forget it, or the way back to it. This was really, really it.

  The only thing that got my feet to move was the idea that came to me at that very moment. Until that point, I’d planned to go east, to try to make it to our home in D.C. Just to see it one last time before I forgot what it looked like. Before I forgot you. That’s probably where you would guess I tried to make it to as well—tried, but got lost and then . . . You know.

  But then I thought, Why? Why not do the opposite? Why not see somewhere completely new for my very last days as Max?

  So I went west instead.

  Orlando Zhang

  THAT WAS HIS LAST NIGHT IN THE SHELTER, ALTHOUGH HE didn’t know it at the time. Ory, sitting alone on a thin mattress, gun over his knee, everything he could carry stuffed into his pockets. So very different from the first night he and Max had spent there.

  It was afternoon in the courtyard that day, years ago. Ory was standing on the lawn, holding a champagne flute in one hand. They called that place Elk Cliffs Resort then. The late sun warmed the left side of everything—faces, tables, each blade of grass. Beside him, Paul was practicing his speech, cursing every time he had to look at the thin, sweat-soaked book in his hands.

  “Fuck. Fuck!” he growled.

  “You know, for a poet, that’s kind of an underwhelming opening line,” Ory said.

  Paul glanced at him. His brow shone in the high-altitude light. “I can’t remember the words,” he confessed sheepishly. “You’d think—I mean, I wrote the goddamn thing for him.” He sighed, meaning the book, all the poems in it. It was his second published collection, dedicated to Imanuel. “You’d think I could memorize the one I want to use for my vows.”

  “He’s a doctor. He’ll never notice,” Ory said. Paul laughed. Across the grass, Max winked at him from afar, dress billowing in the breeze. The game trap was now there in the place where she was standing. “You’ll get it,” Ory tried to reassure him. “One more time.”

  Paul put the book back in his jacket pocket and took a long, deep breath. He squinted into the light. “Seven years, and I’m nervous,” he said. “Isn’t that funny?”

  “Wouldn’t be worth it if you weren’t.” Ory grinned.

  That day was ancient history. Only about four weeks after Hemu Joshi first stepped out to the ravenous flash and whir of news cameras, and a few days after the cases in Brazil and Panama appeared. The U.S. had announced it was considering closing its borders, but aside from the cases that had begun appearing in Latin America, that was as near as the Forgetting seemed. It was still a dim, vague thing, a thing that was happening there, not here. Until suddenly it was.

  It was almost funny when he thought back on it now. There they all were, tuxedoes and dresses fluttering in the fresh mountain breeze, tables set, candles lit ahead of the warming dusk, preparing to celebrate exactly the opposite of what was about to happen: the joining of memories, the promise that they would last long after the people were all gone. Instead, they witnessed the Forgetting reach the United States just before midnight.

  THE CEREMONY WAS BEAUTIFUL. PAUL AND IMANUEL HAD been together longer than Ory and Max, and their love was old news to him—he hadn’t expected to cry when they read their vows. And then when he did, he couldn’t believe he had ever expected not to.

  Ory could see only half of Max’s face from where he was standing at the front next to Paul, but he looked at her anyway as Rabbi Levenson pronounced them married and the room erupted in cheers. She leapt to her feet and stuck her fingers in her mouth in a piercing whistle. Paul and Imanuel were lost in a kiss, but Ory jumped at the sound, and then laughed when he realized it had come from her.

  Ory helped herd everyone into the ballroom, where dining tables and a dance floor were set up. Someone had passed streamer poppers around the crowd, and when Paul and Imanuel entered last, Imanuel red-faced with joy, Paul doing a comical prance and singing a theme song he’d made up for them both, they all pulled the strings and rained a kaleidoscope of sequins and twirling crepe paper scraps down on them.

  “Official co-choreographer,” Max said afterward as she and Ory savored their champagne, disbelieving his claim that he’d helped Paul invent his entrance dance. They were outside in the sloping courtyard with a handful of other guests, looking at the stars and vast darkness of the forest beneath. “I’ll believe it when I see you perform it.”

  “Oh, you’ll see it,” Ory teased. “You’ll see it tonight, in our room.”

  “I look forward to it,” she said, clinking the rim of her glass against his.

  He could tell that in one more drink or so, she’d be ready to go make a fool of herself on the dance floor with him. She was not a great dancer, all angles and elbows, but he loved the fact that she didn’t care at all. He was ready to be a clumsy, gangly embarrassment too, to hold her hands as they spun and to try to dip her, to feel her hair stick to his sweaty cheek as he pulled her back in close. To feel her fingers clutch his shoulders for safety until it pinched when he tried to pick her up into a twirl. He leaned in to smell her perfume, but it was the back of her head facing him suddenly, not the side of her delicate neck. Someone had just pulled her into a hug.

  “Here he is.” Ory grinned and wrapped his arms around both her and Paul, making them into a gigantic, six-legged monster. One of their champagnes went everywhere, disappearing into the grass.

  “My best man,” Paul laughed, and mussed Ory’s hair as he put a protective arm around Max’s shoulder. “Now, you’ve only known him for a few years, but let me tell you something about kid-Ory,” he started, but then Imanuel was there also, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and his phone in the other.

  “Husband!” Paul interrupted himself, and the stern expression on Imanuel’s face, whatever had been distracting him moments before, melted away for an instant as they kissed again. “Is that a patient? Is someone in labor? During our wedding?” Paul te
ased as he pulled back.

  “No,” Imanuel smiled sheepishly, but then the solemn expression returned to line his features. Ory saw he had an internet browser open on the screen of his phone. “I went to get a drink and I heard the caterers talking. It—it happened to Boston.”

  There was a moment when no one knew what he meant. It was probably the last moment that anyone ever didn’t know. Now nothing ever meant anything else.

  “The shadows?” Ory finally asked. But it seemed impossible. The rumors had begun that said perhaps it was something contagious, the new century’s black plague, or Ebola, but it seemed like hysteria, still easy to dismiss. There was just no real information—no one was sending any signals out of the afflicted countries, by phone or email or post or television or radio—and besides satellite images and high-altitude military flyovers, which showed nothing but stillness and the occasional flicker of a terrified shape wandering through streets or jungle, there was nothing else to go on.

  “It happened in Boston?” Max asked.

  “Not in Boston.” Imanuel shook his head. “To Boston. Almost everyone there.”

  BY MIDNIGHT, WORD HAD SPREAD THROUGHOUT THE WEDDING party. The courtyard was deserted, champagne glasses abandoned half-full where they were, and everyone was crowded back into the ballroom. Some were on their cell phones, and the caterers had turned on the TV bolted to the wall in the corner of the room.

  “Don’t,” Max said. She put her hand over Ory’s to stop him from opening the browser on his own phone, cradled now in his palm. They’d left their apartment in D.C. late that morning, and hadn’t packed a charger in the rush to make it to the wedding on time. “Save the power, just in case.” It wouldn’t matter—cellular signal would go down in another day or two before they’d run out of battery—but they didn’t know that then. Ory nodded gratefully at her good thinking and edged the device back into his pocket.