The Book of M. Peng Shepherd
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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 ULTRAPASSE 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.
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