The Book of M (19 page)

THE LIGHT BURNED WHEN HE OPENED HIS EYES. A SEARING,
blinding pain that went straight into the back of his skull. Ory groaned and closed them again. Flashes came back: he was running, the singing note as a metal bat swung through the air, the deserted campus, the fine dust that covered the empty parking lot as he went down, clawing, kicking, the finder and his men slamming their weapons into his ribs.

Ory's hands went to his pocket. The wallet was still there. They hadn't gotten it before he must have driven them off, thank God. The shells, the shotgun, they barely mattered. He still had the photograph of Max.

There was enough light left in the evening sky to get his bearings again. Ory could have, but he didn't go back to see what he'd done to get away. If he'd survived, maybe so had one of them. And if they hadn't, he didn't care.

It took him the rest of the sunset to get back to the pile of sand that had once been their apartment building. Max might not be there, but if she had left any trace of herself at all to follow, he told himself that was where he'd find it.

THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS TO TELL YOU, ORY! I'M
DESPERATE
to record them all before I start to forget. I want to tell you all about the others I'm with now, who they are, what they do, where we're going.

I don't say this to hurt you, I hope you wouldn't take it that way—but until I met them, until Ursula let me join their caravan, I didn't realize how lonely I'd been. I was too busy trying to find a hidden place to sleep each night, trying to stay off the main roads and away from buildings that looked like they might be inhabited. Trying not to die. But I was so lonely. And this part especially I'd never tell you, because it would be too cruel, but I can say it now: I was lonely out here, in this fucked-up new Virginian wilderness, but I was also lonely in our shelter, with you. I don't mean always. I just mean that last week.

It's not your fault. You tried as hard as you could. But you still had your shadow and all of your memories. You always knew who you were. But no matter how hard I try, I'll slowly start to forget myself. I know, I know—you insist that in theory, the Forgetting can be resisted. I don't want to hear it. You don't know, Ory. You don't
know.
I didn't know either, until it finally happened to me. How hard it is to resist. How much the mind wants to fill in holes instead of just leaving them there—even when you know that every time you do it, it'll be wrong, and you'll give up something else that will just make another, bigger hole.

But here, with people like me, I feel light again. They understand. I'm not sure, but I think that being with them is helping me to not forget things—because we all want to remember. I wish you could meet them.

When they started traveling, four of them still had shadows. Now none of them do. It's terrible luck, but I know enough now to know it's
not worth trying to figure out why. The last one to lose her shadow, our leader, is Ursula. I think you would like her, Ory. I'd guess she's in her late forties or early fifties, with dark silvered hair she keeps buzzed as short as a man's underneath the baseball cap she often wears. And her gun. She's never without it. I think it might be the only one we have, among all nine of us. I've been with them two or three days now, and I haven't yet heard Ursula laugh once, or seen her relax for even a moment. It's like she's made out of iron. The only time I've ever seen her smile is when I read the words on the side of their RV.
Our
RV. I'm one of them now.

Then there's Dhuuxo and Intisaar, the twins—refugees from Somalia who came to D.C. as teenagers. They're the ones who went with Ursula and me to the RV on the first night. God, Ory, they're beautiful, and so identical, it's kind of chilling. When they face each other, it's like they're looking into a mirror. They could be each other's own shadow, practically. Can you imagine what it would be like to look exactly like someone else? Sometimes, when I watch them work together, scrubbing dirty laundry in a bucket of water or counting out portions from our food rations for dinner, always perfectly in sync, I feel a twinge of jealousy amid the awe. What breaks my heart about you and me is that if you lost your shadow too, eventually we could have no idea that we belonged together or that we'd meant anything to each other at all. There'd be no evidence, no physical proof. But these two, Dhuuxo and Intisaar, they would
know.
Even if all memory left them, when they looked at each other, they would
know
that they're bound together somehow. Imagine what kind of comfort that would be.

But what I'm really dying to know, what I hope I can work up the courage to ask—admit it, you'd be just as curious as me: do you think they lost their shadows at the same time? And more—do you think they forget the same memories at the same time, or different ones? Together, could they be one complete person?

The rest—Wes, very tall; Lucius, somewhat handsome; Ysabelle,
with such gorgeous long, blond hair; and Victor, the one with a massive tattoo of a lion on his shoulder—I know less about, and mysterious Zachary least of all. They're quieter than Ursula and the twins, watching more than speaking. They lost their shadows earlier, so they have forgotten the most. With Ysabelle and Victor, it's a sad story, Intisaar told me. They met in high school and eloped as soon as they graduated. They'd just sent their youngest off to college a few months before the Forgetting reached the United States. Now they don't remember they were ever married. Intisaar says the only reason they know they ever loved each other at all is because Ursula tells them so, because she met them during the last year that they were still whole.

I'm rambling, but there's still so much to tell you. Thank God I could still read when they found me, is all I can say. I can't imagine what would have happened to them if we hadn't met, and they'd just continued the way they'd been going. They'd been driving straight west for days, completely off course. They never would have reached New Orleans in a hundred years that way.

“Max,” Ursula called from the driver's cockpit of the RV as we bounced slowly along the pockmarked road, “come here a moment.”

I edged over into a crouch beside her seat, using her armrest to steady myself. Everyone else seems to have fifteen jobs, and I have only one. Map reader is definitely an important duty, maybe the most important one after driver—that's what I keep telling myself—but it's still only one. Whenever we stop for the night, Wes follows Victor and Lucius around and gathers firewood by copying their actions; Dhuuxo and Intisaar portion food and water for dinner; Ursula checks our remaining supplies and does a head count every few minutes until we're all gathered back around the fire again, desperate not to lose another one of us; and Ysabelle helps me set up my tent after she does her own. I know. It's so embarrassing. The first night, I was too nervous and humiliated to admit it, so I struggled with the poles and fabric sheets for at least half an hour before Ysa
belle finally pushed me out of the way with a tired sigh, tossed her golden hair out of her eyes, and bent the little thing into shape in less than a minute. “You'll get the hang of it,” she managed to say to me as she walked back to her own. My cheeks were on fire.
I can skin a rabbit!
I wanted to say.
I can twist its neck to kill it quick without flinching!
But that would have made it even more embarrassing, I think. And besides, there's no need for that particular skill—every single person in our caravan can do it. It's nothing special.

Have I told you how nice my tent is, by the way? It's warm and dry, and so colorful when the light strikes the thin material. In the mornings it's beautiful.

The only one who seems to do less than me—almost nothing at all—is Zachary. Strange, silent Zachary.

He was in the passenger seat as I crouched down next to Ursula. I tried to make eye contact with him, but he was lost, staring unblinking out the window with his pale eyes. I wonder if he's forgotten too much to remember how to speak, but I'm afraid to ask in case it's rude. I don't know the rules yet, if there even are rules.

“You should keep this with you always now,” Ursula said when she realized I was waiting beside her, and she handed me our road map from the glove compartment.

“I will,” I said. When her gaze returned to the windshield, I turned the paper around as casually as I could, hoping that she wouldn't notice she had given it to me upside down.

I concentrated, looking for our location. It's not that I
can't
navigate—you know that, Ory. It's just, we were always on subways in D.C. Finding the right train line and then sticking to it isn't the same as trying to compare a road map to a broken, shifting wilderness that no longer matches it at all. And especially when getting lost and losing a few hours or days could mean the difference between reaching our destination in time or forgetting we ever wanted to go there. I know you were a Boy Scout back in Oregon, but you should try map reading when almost all the signs on the road are collapsed or overgrown
with choking vines, or flapping madly, trying to fly away like birds chained to a post by one claw. You would be proud of me, I think. I focused on the page roughly where I thought we might be, somewhere just south of Fairfax Station—that was where I'd found them the first night, when Ursula demanded I read the side of their RV—and waited until we passed a sign still whole enough that I could decode it. Ursula doesn't remember anymore the way that maps work, but she knows that it has something to do with both the lines on the paper and the outside world, so she bit her tongue as patiently as she could as the seconds ticked by.

Finally I put my hand down on the swirling, colored shapes. “We're still on the right path,” I said to her. “When we begin again tomorrow, we should stay on this wide road. It should take us almost all the way there if we don't lose it.” We were on what was left of the I-85 South.

“You're sure,” she said to confirm.

“I'm sure,” I said, truly confident this time. “I can still read it.”

Ursula nodded. “You should sit up here from now on,” she said. “Easier to see the road.”

“But what about Zachary?” I asked.

Ursula glanced at him, and he nodded. I didn't know if it was because he'd understood her words or just intuited what she wanted. He unclicked his seat belt and rose from the chair as if in a trance. “He doesn't mind,” Ursula said as he edged around me, and set himself up at the foldout table in the middle of the cabin. Dhuuxo and Intisaar scooted over to give him the spot closest to the window so he could stare out it. “He can draw from anywhere.”

“Draw?”

“Zachary makes all of our signs for us,” Ursula said. “To help us remember important things.” She held up one hand and pursed the fingers, rubbing them together, to indicate the perpetual stains on his own. “It's ink,” she added. Then she pulled a paper out of the cubby in the dashboard and handed it to me. It was a picture of eight of them
that were left, in excruciating detail, all without shadows. “He did that the day before we found you.”

I turned around to stare at him, overcome. His pale blond hair, blue eyes. He was the one who had filled Oakton High School with drawings, Ory! The self-portrait with a shadow, the pair of lovers who must have been Ysabelle and Victor—a woman with long blond hair and a man with a lion tattoo emblazoned on his bicep. The two dark figures in identical poses that I now understood hadn't been badly faded renderings of shadows, but Dhuuxo and Intisaar. He was trying to record their memories in the only way he still could.

Our eyes met, and his gaze trailed down the string dangling from my neck. To the tape recorder suspended in the air. I looked down and touched it, to stop its slow spin. When I looked back up, he nodded to me, as if even though he didn't know how it worked, he understood what it was for. That it was the same thing as his drawings.

Ursula drove. I kept us on the path. The cabin jangled softly as we went over a pothole, but I kept my finger gently pressed against the waxy paper. I could tell it made her happy. She doesn't remember you can work a map just by looking at it, and thinks it needs to be touched. So I touch it. It's the least I can do for her while she drives us all.

When we stopped for Victor to have a smoke and the others to have a bathroom break in the weeds by the side of the road, Zachary returned to the front cabin and climbed silently into Ursula's vacant seat. He looked at the map in my hands and then out the window, where Ursula was standing in the shade of an underpass, waiting for everyone to board the RV again. He took the top paper from a stack in his pocket and sketched thoughtfully for a few minutes. When he was finished, he handed it to me and smiled. It was a perfect render
ing of the weathered I-85 sign above Ursula's head. Zachary didn't remember anymore what the sign was or maybe even what a freeway is, but knew that it had something to do with my map and it was important. I stared at his picture of the little blue shield with a red border for a long time after he went back to his seat. At the little white shapes in the center of the sign. I wish I could show it to you, Ory. The difference between a
written
letter and a
drawn
one is small, but fascinating.