The Book of M. Peng Shepherd
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mime—instructions to stop and turn back around at the confused, terrified shadowless man approaching them, no one knew if it was or wasn’t something that could be passed by breath or touch. Everything else in the world had always worked that way. At the time, there was no reason to think this was any different. They couldn’t be blamed for what happened then.
The president’s little speech box disappeared, and the split screen suddenly dropped the view of downtown to focus on only the highway feed as the commotion started. A shadowless man had wandered away from the city and was now stumbling toward the line of soldiers, crying, but not saying any words or seeming to hear the ones being shouted at him. He looked to be in his fifties—still strong, but balding, and beginning to grow a middle-aged paunch. He wore brown corduroys, a button-down shirt, and a navy blue sweater over it, pristine in the harsh blaze of the emergency floodlights. He looks like a university professor, Ory thought dazedly. A university professor with no shadow.
The soldiers were screaming now, some waving, some holding an open hand straight out in the universal gesture to stop, to fucking stop, stop or we have to shoot, we have to shoot to kill. The man didn’t seem to recognize or remember any of it at all.
The station tried to cut away, but they weren’t fast enough. Several guests in the ballroom screamed as the shadowless man on-screen snapped to a halt, frozen upright for one lingering instant, and then crumpled to the ground.
The news anchor materialized on-screen again, looking disoriented and unprepared, stumbling through a statement that was being fed to him through his earpiece. “We want to apologize for that graphic video clip … It was not our intention to air such an upsetting image … Unfortunately the nature of live news sometimes …”
“Holy shit, Ory,” Max murmured, her whole body tense. “Do we know anyone in Boston? Do you have friends or family there?” People had started arguing now, some calling for calm, others shouting across the room to each other for any new information they could dig up on their phones. Someone had a laptop out and was connecting it to Elk Cliffs’s Wi-Fi.
“I don’t think so,” Ory said, but his head was swimming. He felt dizzy.
“This is really bad,” Max kept saying. “This is really, really bad.”
Ory tried to refute that, to be the strong, steady one who would keep them both anchored, but he couldn’t find the words. The TV was back on the helicopter camera hovering over Boston city limits, the body of the fallen shadowless man still in the street, this time pixelated into an indiscernible mass. Ory couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked like even in death, his shadow hadn’t returned. The thought sent a chill through him.
The National Guard were still shoulder to shoulder, a wall across the road. They looked shaken, as if they were clinging to one another instead of forming a blockade. One was holding a black body bag in his hands, gun strapped back across his shoulders, but he was held by orders in the line, unable to go forward and lay it over the dead man, in case whatever was causing the Forgetting was transmissible through the air. The soldiers suddenly tensed, and guns rose from their downward angle to point straight forward with agonizing dread. More shadowless were approaching. Some running, some screaming, some silent.
This time the station didn’t waste any time. The screen cut back to the anchor at the desk, who was scrambling through freshly scribbled papers and a blaring earpiece, trying not to listen for the sound of impending gunfire through the tiny speaker. Mid-speech he stammered. A long, horrible pause. He closed his eyes involuntarily. Then he opened them and kept going.
Ory glanced around the room and swallowed hard, to try to calm himself down, and looked back at the screen. Then he heard the anchor say something about Denver. He pulled Max closer, wrapped his arms around her, and squeezed with everything he had as the news cut to a reporter in Colorado. Someone had begun to sob.
“Hey,” he said as he crushed her into the hug. The shocked, rising hum of too many voices at once echoed off the stone walls of the ballroom. Shouts and ring tones blended into an eerie, doomed musical harmony. He wanted to say something comforting, to sound like he was there for her, to make it feel like it was all going to be okay soon, but the fear had numbed his mind. “Blue,” he finally managed, no more than a whisper.
“Fifty-two,” she whispered back.
I CAN’T REALLY AVOID IT ANY LONGER, I GUESS. NOT TALKING about it isn’t going to change that it happened, so I might as well say something before I forget how it went. I don’t know if I believe you yet, Ory. If recording things will really make a difference at all. But if it does—well, I don’t really know what are the most important things to get down on tape yet, so I figure I should probably just say everything I can think of. Including this.
So. The day I lost my shadow.
It was two weeks ago now. Which is a pretty long time for me to still remember as much as I do, judging by past cases. Everyone’s different, though, they say. Hemu Joshi started losing his memories so quickly, just a few days in, but there were reports of some people in Mumbai who took a month to forget anything significant. I think the longest one I ever heard about before the electricity went out was about a month and a half. So hopefully I’m more toward that side of the average. These past two weeks have felt like a year, in some ways. To have a month and a half left before it all goes, it might feel like an eternity.
This is strange, talking to myself and you like this. Especially since I’m not there with you anymore. I have a confession: I actually wasn’t going to use the tape recorder, even though I promised you I would. But then I got out here, alone, and I just—it feels good to talk. It makes me feel real still.
I know I’m the one who left and that you’ll never hear this, but before I start, I want to say, just in case: Ory, if you’re listening to this—somehow, some way—it didn’t hurt. So don’t worry about that part, at least. I hardly felt it.
There was nothing about that morning two weeks ago that seemed different. I’m sure you’d say the same. I looked normal, felt normal. We split a can of corn from our dwindling cupboard supply, and then you left to check the trap and then the city. I’ve racked my brain for anything. A sign, a twinge, a premonition. But there was nothing.
After you left, I went into the kitchenette to do the counting for us. How many matches. How many shotgun shells. How many pills of found Tylenol, amoxicillin, doxycycline. I felt like a squirrel, counting how many nuts we’d managed to store in the hole in our tree to see if it was enough to last through the winter.
You know this already—the kitchenette was my favorite room in the shelter, because the window was so small and our floor was high enough up that a person couldn’t see in from the ground, so the glass there could stay uncovered. At first you wanted to block it like the rest of them, just to be safe, but I managed to convince you to leave just that one open. I don’t think you have any idea how much time I spent in that room on days you were out scavenging for supplies or skinning a mouse from our trap. Some mornings, I just lay on the floor there, sunbathing.
Sometimes, on particularly bright days when the wind was very still, two little gray sparrows would land on the branches of the tree outside that window. I think they might even have been mates. A few weeks ago, even though it was already getting cold, one of them came back with some sticks, and I was so excited that they might be building their nest there that I forgot to do anything I was supposed to do that day, which was quite a bit: I had at least three of your shirts to sew because you kept ripping the seam where the sleeve joined the shoulder, and I was supposed to repair the cardboard covering on one of the first-floor windows where it had peeled loose and was flapping against the cracked glass in the breeze. You were afraid the movement might attract passersby that otherwise wouldn’t have noticed or considered the building. I agreed that this made sense. I just completely forgot, because of the birds. We got in a pretty big fight about that when you got home, I remember. That was before