The Book of M (23 page)

Finally Ory smiled, too. He couldn't help it.

“I remember standing there with Paul, watching the broadcast. I thought,
It's going to happen to us, too.
One of us was going to lose his shadow, and it was going to be me.” His eyes searched Ory's face. “I was convinced it was going to be me. Because he was so strong. So . . . larger than life, and sure of everything, always. I was always the one afraid or uncertain. Never taking risks. Standing there in front of the TV, I couldn't imagine how I'd go on without him, as just myself. I thought that meant something. A weakness.” He shrugged. On the floor, his shadow did the same. “Here I am.”

Ory looked down again. He didn't want to agree with it, but he knew Imanuel was right.

“I have to tell you something else,” Imanuel began again at last. “I just want you to listen, that's all.” He drew closer, voice dropping. “I've heard some things over the last two years. Not much, but snatches here and there. It's rumor, but so many people have the same story, there must be at least some truth to it.” Imanuel was speaking faster and faster in his excitement. “They're saying—”

“New Orleans.” Ory grimaced.

Imanuel blinked in surprise. The icy rain pattered against the ground into slush outside. “You know about it, too,” he said at last.

“I heard the same thing back in Arlington.” The group of hardened travelers standing around an empty pool played in his mind like a silent film. Their leader's leathery face and shaved head, her gun: Ursula. Had they made it after all? How many of them still had their shadows?

“Well, that's what the books are for. The One Who Gathers, the rumors say he's gathering people, but not just people—he's looking for something else. Memories. Books have memories, right?” Imanuel asked, staring hard at his hands. “In a way.”

“Books also have shadows,” Ory said. Imanuel looked up at him hopefully. “So do pieces of shit sitting out on the asphalt.”

“Ory,” he bristled.

“So do dead birds, trash cans, decrepit buildings—”

“Stop.”

“I'm just saying, that's a lot of risk to collect thousands of books from a crazed warrior clan and a long, dangerous way to drag them for a rumor about a bunch of jumbled nonsense.”

Imanuel refused to give up. “I don't think it's just a rumor.”

Ory didn't look at him. He couldn't. They both knew what he was going to ask next.

“Ory, it's over,” Imanuel said gently. Ory felt his hand on his shoulder. “It's been weeks since she forgot, and disappeared. She's gone. She was gone a long time ago. There's no reason to stay here now.”

“No,” Ory said.

“Ory—”

“
No.
”

Imanuel put his hands up and moved back a few steps as a gesture of peace. He took a long breath. In the dim light, Ory could see the outline of him against the wall grow and shrink as he did.

“I know how bad the odds are,” Ory said. The fire hissed. “But I just
can't
.” He stared at the exhausted slope of Imanuel's shoulders. “If it was the other way around, what would you want me to do for you? What if Paul was possibly still here in D.C.? What would you want me to
do
?”

Imanuel turned away abruptly, and made a sudden sound that could have been a sob. It came from so deep inside him that Ory jerked halfway to his feet before he realized he'd even moved, arms out to catch his friend before he fell. It was the sound of pain that was too great for a mind to bear anymore. The sound of a soul dying, leaving only biological echoes behind to wander through the motions of life until the end. Ory waited for a long time, for the rest of it, for Imanuel to collapse. But nothing followed. Nothing fell into his arms.

“I would want you to tell me to give up,” Imanuel finally said, but the words were hardly words. They were a moan.

Ory looked at him as he withered in the firelight. Too far. His words had gone too far. Imanuel's hands were still pressed against his face, blocking his expression from view. Their shadows twitched, weak in the firelight.

“I shouldn't have said that,” Ory finally said. “I—”

Imanuel held his hand up, to cut him off. “After.” His voice was hard. “After we get Paul's book, I'll lend you a few soldiers to look for Max. But I promised them all that if they helped me get what I need, all of them would make it to New Orleans with me. I can't go back on my word. Whatever you decide for yourself is up to you, but the soldiers will stay with you for two weeks and then follow after us.”

“Thank you,” Ory said.

Imanuel nodded. Ory thought he was going to leave, but he stayed there, head down, for a long time. “I hope you change your mind before that,” he finally said. “About New Orleans.”

“I can't,” Ory said.

“Can't,” he asked. “Or won't?”

They looked at each other for a long time. “I don't want to forget,” Ory said.

The expression on Imanuel's face was the worst kind of pain. “I didn't say forget,” he murmured quietly, his voice thick with sadness. “I would never say forget.”

THE FIRST SHADOWLESS HE FOUND WAS CALLED MICHAEL.

A teenager, about nineteen perhaps. Not that tall, and painfully skinny from weeks of starvation, with a tousle of silky dark hair and a few faint freckles on his pale, scared face. He'd been digging around in the long-emptied garbage bins in the alley behind the assisted-living facility, searching for something edible. The noise was what had drawn them to him. The amnesiac, Dr. Zadeh, and Nurse Marie stood blocking the only way out of the narrow, dead-end street with their bodies long before he heard them there.

“Easy,” the amnesiac said when the shadowless finally turned around, then started, movements swift and compact like a cornered animal. The amnesiac glanced at Dr. Zadeh, who was trying to stand in a posture that both appeared as unthreatening as possible and also covered as much of the alley as possible. “Do you remember English?” he continued. “You understand what I'm saying?”

The shadowless flinched. His hands were curled into defensive claws. The amnesiac felt the weight of the kitchen knife on his belt in its crudely fashioned plastic and duct tape scabbard. He'd practiced reaching for the handle and whipping it out several times before they went outside. He didn't want to
have to
be good with a blade
—
but he did want to be good with a blade. Just in case.

“You look hungry,” Dr. Zadeh said. The amnesiac saw recognition register in the boy's eyes. The meaning of that word, the hope. “What's your name?”

The shadowless stared at them. Slowly the hands uncurled. His eyes shimmered, tears like mirrors. “I don't remember,” he moaned.

“That's all right,” Dr. Zadeh smiled. “How about we give you one? Your name is Michael,” he said.

“Michael,” the shadowless repeated. “Michael,” he said again more fiercely, in the familiar tone the amnesiac had heard so many times. A desperation not just to cling to something, but to have something to cling to in the first place.

“Michael, we're friends,” Dr. Zadeh continued. “We're here to help you. I'm a doctor. You can call me Dr. Zadeh.”

“What kind of doctor?”

“A neurologist,” he said, not expecting the term to mean anything anymore to Michael. The amnesiac could see from his expression that it didn't. “I work on the brain.” He pointed to the side of his head, at his temple. “My specialty is memories.”

The word hung in the air between all of them like a physical thing.
Memories.
The amnesiac watched Michael take a step toward them, as if to move into the aura of those lingering syllables.

“You can make me remember?” he asked with terrifying desperation.

No,
the amnesiac wanted to say. How much had Michael forgotten? he wondered. What magic had he already done? “We can try,” he said instead.

MICHAEL SETTLED IN, AND THE AMNESIAC BEGAN TEACHING
him the same Alzheimer's memory exercises Dr. Zadeh had taught him when he'd first arrived. It was mostly useless, but they had to start somewhere. There was a process, a scientific process, Dr. Zadeh insisted as he tried to finish his experimental treatment plan. If they were going to find the cure, they had to do it right. They needed patients, and they needed a process.

“We don't even know the cause of shadowlessness,” the amnesiac had argued. “How can you develop a treatment plan if we don't even know the cause?”

“That's what will make us fail, right there,” Dr. Zadeh said. He pointed at him.

The amnesiac stared back, confused. “What?” he finally asked.

“Doubt,” Dr. Zadeh replied.

The amnesiac wasn't sure what he believed, but he put that aside. He didn't argue against the doctor's plan after that. He did everything he was asked, everything he could, to keep the patients safe. New Orleans had been shadowless for almost a month by then. Once the Forgetting reached the city limits, he had helped Dr. Zadeh remove all the signs on their facility—the metal address numbers on the front wall, Dr. Zadeh's name plaque by the door, the information board that was posted on the roof. Anything that would tell someone who still remembered how to read that a doctor could be inside, that there might be medicine or food as well. They added locks to doors and boarded up windows. Now the assisted-living facility looked no different from the rest of the ruined structures that surrounded it.

Once they were confident the building was secure and inconspicious, Dr. Zadeh, the amnesiac, and Nurse Marie sneaked out a few more times to look for more shadowless to admit to the assisted-living facility, growing bolder, going farther into the city each time. Some listened, some ran. When they started taking Michael with them, always holding Nurse Marie's hand so he didn't wander off, they became much better at persuading other shadowless to trust them. The amnesiac started bringing food when they went out looking—both as a gesture of good faith and as a way to stop the shadowless from fleeing immediately, before any of them could get a full sentence out.

Even when the power went down across New Orleans and the riots broke out, Dr. Zadeh refused to give up. Even when the police finally left their posts around the city one by one, and bodies in the streets—shadowed and shadowless alike—became more and more common, he pressed on.

“How many more patients do we need?” the amnesiac asked him one night, after they'd rationed out dinner for everyone.

“As many as we can find,” he said. “But I'd settle for at least eight. That's enough for two groups, including our own people—one variable, one control. Then we'll start getting somewhere.”

The amnesiac looked down at the binder in his hands, the copy of the one Hemu Joshi's doctor had given him, at the list of names he had added as the very first page. Everyone inside the assisted-living facility: ten nurses, one doctor, ten Alzheimer's patients, one case of total retrograde amnesia due to vehicular trauma, and the three newcomers they'd found—including Michael. Next to the names of all three of the new people, two of the Alzheimer's patients, and one of the nurses, the amnesiac had drawn stars. Shadowless, the symbol meant. Shadowless, but still alive.

INDIA NEWS, INC. [INI] REPORTER:
And you are—?

ELIZABETH HERRERA:
Catholic. Born and raised.

The amnesiac scooted the list of names over farther so he could see the page beneath. It was one he knew well. An excerpt of a decades-old interview with the American biologist—the one with the prosthetic leg who had taught Gajarajan's elephant sister to paint.

INI:
Which you offer as proof that you've never met the elephant, Gajarajan Guruvayur Kesavan?

HERRERA:
Guruvayur Temple's rules are very clear: only Hindus are allowed inside the gates. I did try, though, when the story about Gajarajan first broke. I called and explained who I was—I got halfway through my speech before it clicked. Immediately they were all yelling. They called for the head priest. And still, I couldn't get in.

INI:
What happened after that?

HERRERA:
All bad ideas, none of which worked either. I tried to bribe them, I tried to reach someone in government to help, I even briefly considered trying to break in—I just wanted proof. To be told something like that had happened; that I'd successfully taught painting for the first time in history to a wild elephant born in 1998, some twenty years after her elder brother had been captured and permanently stationed at the temple, and then a few days before my research rotation in India was over, the elder brother spontaneously painted a picture . . . Of me?

INI:
It is uncanny.

HERRERA:
That's a word for it. I have another one.
Magic.

INI:
It's hard to disagree.

HERRERA:
Well, what happened next was even more . . . uncanny. After I finally threw in the towel, I had only about a week left at Thiruvananthapuram before my research visa was up and I had to return to the United States. I hardly had time to finish the work I had left, but on the last day, I blocked off an hour to go see Manikam, to say goodbye. That's her name, the one I taught to paint. The much younger sister of Gajarajan.

INI:
That must have been hard.

HERRERA:
It was. But it's always that way. There are only so many elephants left in the world, you know? To get the data you need, the sample size you need, you're always traveling between sanctuaries. India, Thailand, Tennessee.

INI:
Go on.

HERRERA:
I was with her, alone in the main pasture. Well, she started making the motions she always made when she wanted to paint—it's a specific trunk movement and the ears flapping in a certain way. I had learned to recognize it. I took out her easel and canvas and paints and set them up for her. Sometimes Manikam knew what she wanted to paint, sometimes she didn't, but this was one of those times she did—it was like she'd
gotten an image in her head and had just been waiting for me to get there so I could help her set up the easel and paints.

INI:
Did she paint?

HERRERA:
She did. Immediately. Normally, it's a slow process. She sometimes had trouble holding the brush with her trunk—she'd lose her grip on it, drop it. But this time, she jammed the bristles into the paints on her big palette almost before I'd finished preparing it. She worked . . . desperately. That's the word I'd use. When she finished, it was all at once. Usually it was hard for me to tell when she was really done, because she'd dawdle, and I'd go to remove the canvas and she'd get upset. But this time it was a fury of color, then suddenly it was over. She stepped back and stared at me, as if inviting me to look.

INI:
What did you see?

HERRERA:
I didn't know at first. It was so detailed. I thought it was a pattern of some kind. Sort of geometric and repeating. It was.

INI:
I don't understand.

HERRERA:
I didn't either. But that evening, one of the interns came into the main lab. I had the easel sitting by my desk so the canvas could continue drying. She took one look at it and asked me if Manikam had done it. “Why?” I asked. She said it was because it reminded her of the painted walls of the temple her mother used to take her to when she was growing up—one county over, in the town of Guruvayur.

INI:
No.

HERRERA:
I didn't believe it either. I printed a scanned copy and mailed it to them.

INI:
And was it—

HERRERA:
Yes. It was an exact replica of the pattern of the northern wall of Gajarajan's residential enclosure. Down to the centimeter. [
Smiles.
]

INI:
It's not, it's not—

HERRERA:
I know.

INI:
[After a long pause]
What happened then?

HERRERA:
I left. I had to. My research visa was up.

INI:
That . . . That must have been hard.

HERRERA:
But it was okay, you know? Now I don't really care what anyone else thinks. I'm not a neurologist, but to me, that proved it. It proved that the stories about Gajarajan were true. That elephants really could remember things they hadn't experienced directly, but others had. That they could . . . I don't know.

INI:
Please.

HERRERA:
Like memories are something we somehow can move or share. Maybe not even all of them, but at least one. One memory. One thing that always stays, across time and space.

The amnesiac looked up from the binder, at Dr. Zadeh. “You really think we're going to find a cure?” he asked.

Dr. Zadeh was silent for so long, the amnesiac thought he might not answer, because the answer was no, and he didn't want to lie. “We have to,” he finally said instead.

THEY WENT OUT EVERY OTHER DAY, LOOKING FOR FOOD AND
supplies in the mornings and shadowless in the afternoons. Something was happening, but it was hard to tell what. There were signs of human life left behind—things changed places, scavenged morsels among the wreckage appeared or went missing—but the humans themselves, living ones, were becoming harder and harder to find. There was more dried blood in the corners of places than there had been before. Twice they actually did glimpse other shadowed survivors—but they weren't the sort of survivors the amnesiac wanted to meet. The first group was traveling in a set of three, and the second in a pair. All men, all wearing makeshift gear that looked as though it was for fighting, all well armed. Dr. Zadeh's little team waited inside
alleys and broken buildings until the others passed both times. They didn't know what the men were looking for, but they didn't want to find out.

They managed to find four more shadowless over the next few weeks. The first two had each forgotten so much they were barely wary at all. The third was far more afraid.

She was running, clothes soaked through with sweat. She must have been going for miles. “You're safe now,” Dr. Zadeh kept repeating to her, begging her to come out from the abandoned house she'd thrown herself into when she saw them coming from the other direction.

The amnesiac started tossing the food in the open window through which she'd crawled. They'd never been so deep into the downtown before.

“We just want to help. I'm a doctor,” Dr. Zadeh continued.

Finally it was the shadowless Michael who convinced her.

“My name is Letty,” she said softly as she walked with them back toward the assisted-living facility on the other side of town.

“What were you running from?” Nurse Marie asked her.

“Exterminators,” she said.

“Exterminators?” the amnesiac asked. Beside him, he saw Michael shudder.